Horizon

behind all our cluttered, close horizons--
behind the uniform suburban houses,
across their predictable streets and
urban blight, over the plastic signs
electric-lit, advertising whiskey
and tobacco, hotels, auto sales:
behind all this, always, eventually,
a hill-cresting line of trees
overlooks some long, low valley
covered in forest (these woods
along the contours of the Earth
are the moss on a dimpled stone,
while within and between those trees
is Life: predictable, minuscule, indomitable)
--and this horizon lives behind my eyes,
protecting, balancing what I feel and see
in all my close and dismal skies.




June 2017

Blossom

Infant faces
blossom
like flowers
at Sol's first light:
youth in springtime
before electricity
or internal combustion.




june 2017

A Page from the Abel Monologues

"Life is simple when observed dispassionately.  Absent implications, absent fears, hopes, or dreams, it follows a very basic course of metabolizing and procreating, until eventually time runs out and it's over.  That's that.  And Life goes on, all around it.  Careful consideration calls into question whether Death is even worthy of any independent consideration, being only a bookend on a repetitive organic process.

"Dying an animal's death terrifies humans, who hope (despite themselves) to exist forever.  The human imagination of immortality recoils from the prospect of termination, of simple not-being.  Once thrust forth into the universe as an existence, a reality, the mind of a mammal expecting eternity becomes its own fatal addiction.  Existence itself becomes the underlying desire creating context and cause for all other desires.

"Cynics and atheists insist..."

K shut the book with a snap.  Whoever Abel was--he didn't understand humans.  "I was okay with not existing, before I did," he muttered.  "Don't figure I'll mind after I don't anymore."  With the slim volume clumsily back on the shelf, K fumbled toward the door.

He couldn't fault Abel too gravely, he decided in retrospect.  Plenty of humans didn't understand humans--and they had the advantage over Abel of having actual experience being a human.  As far as K could tell, Abel had only ever been an artificial intelligence algorithm living in a fungus hurtling through space in one of humanity's stupidest ideas.



June 2017

Enemies

I do not have enemies.
Do not think kindly of me;
people have hated
me, of course; but
I am not important
enough to have enemies.
God is; nations are; perhaps
some humans or institutions
can be, briefly; and, of course
we each have our own demons;
but I have never had an enemy. 
Almost no-one truly has.




June 2017

Beginnings

It occurs to me suddenly.
We remember beginnings

and ends; but

the work's done in the middle.

Perspiration beads,

two from the river, fall

onto the log; I switch my arms

on the handsaw, adjust my weight,

and carry on;

Saturday glows
through the woods

in a summer afternoon.

June 2017