As Above, So Below
Ding, dong,
Bell's theorem;
a stop on the bus;
pussy's well-connected
paws hold fast
her grid
the narcotics in
dad's pipe
explode the baleful sun,
somehow,
now and then.
Could it be,
caught in the field,
tomorrow
is locked and bolted,
delivered ready-made today?
Unchanged, we strut out the door,
make our schemes while
Einstein's ghost
in patterns
comes and goes,
whispering chaos
triumphant;
tomorrow
come and gone,
like distant thunder.
Leave the gates open:
back and forth
across the field,
like an ox,
the shuttling flux
gives an answer.
No question:
if the mini-maxi bits
of the world
travel fast and alone,
zipping down
unpredestined grooves,
then the bible's right;
then
all is a watch in the night,
the night gang
watching for the
swing of chance
to show a way,
make a map to somewhere,
accurate as random waves
or the gods' good will.
The dance is dancing;
the spiders and horses
prancing
in great and small circles
leave not a trace;
only web and sweat
remain for the flies.
And Proud of It
All vanity,
said the preacher of Ecclesiastes,
picking his way through
his ennobling prose,
all beneath.
Hills and streams
the backs of our ears
the wind at our backs
our Hamlets not real;
man's inhumanity or love
incompetent and
incomplete.
Rock of the hearth
star and soil
all vain and thin
wasted with self-feeling;
to be alone
and adore
the gape of time
and ages gone, too,
is no powerful liniment;
pour good, pour often
what speck we have,
waste as you will;
on a corner
at the end of time
death
waiting
will not care
will not spare you
nor scant you
eternal rest.
Root Hog
Root hog or die,
what they say;
flog the memory
for any old saw
or flight of fancy
to give some weight
to what, after all,
is just another tiresome day.
What a way
to frame the business of life
in a bunch of words,
good, bad or indifferent;
florid metaphors,
banal tags
clamped on brave
supernal human thoughts,
decked out
fancy and useless
as chandeliers
in the noonday sun.
Root hog
for your own sake
or Christ’s sake,
go ahead and find
Francis Bacon;
now no more
than famous
and dead.
What’s the use?
We know him
or we don’t.
The proof of knowing
intensive
in a pudding
Einstein himself
would fail to see
rise to reason or sense.
Words or deeds?
Overloaded science
random or precise,
being or nothing,
needs an axe to cut
the meat from the bone,
a knife to slice
the meat from the fat,
and who’s to say
it’s worth the effort?
Lady Husbandry’s
a cold hard consort
in the groves of academe,
where nothing grows
that’s not cut to order.
Root hog, root
or die or still unquiet
and alive,
continue your quest,
trotting towards
the setting sun;
along the way
try to settle
a few old debts,
but leave the fancy thoughts,
the complications, to those
who have no business
at the dirty trough;
we know who they are.
You have no time
for them,
no time at all to
look at the sky,
the sea, the land;
in the end
clamps on your nuts,
the knife cuts
you off from
Francis Bacon
and every single thing
you thought you ever knew.
There is nothing for you
but hanging dead
and bloody,
strung up
and ready to be gutted.
There are other ways, surely,
a ceremony, a grave,
but it’s all the same;
our fancy human
ways no more than
progressions of death
prettied up and
pretend and
in the end,
we all fail the living
because there they are,
left behind,
and here we are
nothing.
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