For knowledge, says the Old Sage, add; for wisdom,
subtract. My head in a surgeon’ s chair, checking
Lao Tsu’ s math as these teeth I barely knew
I had (mumbled of as wisdom) introduced
themselves — rude party guests — right as they had
to go, their pinched goodbye-hello. Like learning
you’ ve been speaking your whole life in prose,
or my late eighth-grade astonishment that I —
confirmed a Gentile in almost all respects —
had hung so long among the circumcised.
up a little,” he says,
shutting the rusted tailgate,
“maybe at least lean
down from your high horse
and look busy,” picking up
his work gloves and his spade.
“You’ re not the only
hick on the clock
with an education,” he says, half-
laughing, half-wheezing,
and spits, his bottom lip bulging
with a load of Skoal,“even
if you do think pretty highly
of your poetry.”
He fancies his chances are good with her,
unaware that in the years since the war
she has come to prefer women whose cunts
taste like mustard. To pin one’ s hopes on
a bark-colored moth, its wings crinkled
like crepe paper, a moth affixed high
on the kitchen wall, frozen for days where
it will likely die in noble clinging mode
just under the cobwebby heating vent,
is to confirm your need for more friends
and a greater daily quota of sunlight.
To raise C.’ s hopes that T. can stop
I find it helpful to imagine writing in a blizzard
with every inscription
designed to prevent snow
crystals from drifting in.
Avoid the hive mind. Go fly a kite,
raise a stained glass window in the sky.
It’ s the opposite of making love to drudgery,
what I do for a dying.
Remove the bitter sediment
trapped in the brewer. It will be new
whether you make it new
or not. It will be full of neo-
This time I’ m not going to say a thing
about deity. It’ s not the blizzard,
it’ s three days after. Trinkle from thawing
roofs, ruined crocus pronging through.
Ruin, I promise, won’ t be mentioned again.
Trees, sure, still begging in the road, split
to the bole but this isn’ t about the chainsaw.
A pruning saw will have to do. The puppets
Is everything a field of energy caused
by human projection? From the crib bars
hang the teething tools. Above the finger-drummed
desk, a bit lip. The cyclone fence of buts
surrounds the soccer field of what if.
Sometimes it seems like a world where no one
knows what he or she is doing, eight lanes
both directions. How about a polymer
Do nothing and everything will be done,
that's what Mr. Lao Tzu said, who walked
around talking 2,500 years ago and
now his books practically grow on trees
they're so popular and if he were
alive today beautiful women would
rush up to him like waves lapping
at the shores of his wisdom.
That's the way it is, I guess: humbling.
Though the amaryllis sags and spills
so do those my wishes serve, all along the town.
And yes, the new moon, kinked there in night's patch,
tugs me so — but I can't reach to right the slant.
And though our cat pads past without a tail, some
with slinking tails peer one-eyed at the dawn, some
with eyes are clawless, some with sparking claws
contain no voice with which to sing
of foxes gassing in the lane.
Round-shouldered pals
That the dead are real to us
Cannot be denied,
That the living are more real
When they are dead
Terrifies, that the dead can rise
As the living do is possible
Is possible to surmise,
But all the stars cannot come near
All we meet in an eye.
Flee from me, fear, as soot
Flies in a breeze, do not burn
Or settle in my sight,
I’ ve tasted you long enough,
Let me savor
Something otherwise.
Who wakes beside me now
Suits my soul, so I turn to words
Only to say he changes
I’ m sitting at Nathan’ s, reading a biography of Darwin
who, right now, is dissecting a barnacle
“no bigger than a pinhead (and with two penises)”:
he’ ll work like this on barnacles, his wrists supported
by rigged-up blocks of workshop wood, for eight years.
Nathan is reading too, in the worn-down banged-up “daddy chair”:
those philosophical poems of William Bronk’ s. What’ s
most delightful is that Tristan, eleven, and Aidan, ten,
