Lemon

The grated lemon rind bitters the oil it steeps in.

A wanted flavor.

Like the moment in love when one lover knows

the other could do anything now wanted, yet does not.

Evolution & Glass

For days a fly travelled loudly

from window to window,

until at last it landed on one I could open.

It left without thanks or glancing back,

believing only—quite correctly—in its own persistence.

Tool Use in Animals

For a long time it was thought

the birds were warning: Panther! Panther!

Then someone understood. The birds were scavengers.

The cry was, “Human! Human!”

Global Warming

When his ship first came to Australia,

Cook wrote, the natives

continued fishing, without looking up.

Unable, it seems, to fear what was too large to be comprehended.

The Immortal

This seemingly indestructible head-and-claw

of a handle-less hammer:

a furious, minor god from a great epic,

whose language—camphorous, lithe—was never recorded.

Insomnia, Listening

Three times in one night

a small animal crosses the length of the ceiling.

Each time it goes all the way one way,

all the way back, without hesitation or pause.

Envy that sureness.

It is like being cut-flowers, between the field and the vase.

Why Bodhidharma Went to Motel 6

“Where is your home?” the interviewer asked him.

“Here.”

“No, no,” the interviewer said, thinking it a problem of translation,

“when you are where you actually live?”

Now it was his turn to think, Perhaps the translation?

A Class Almost Empty

How did Roget decide

that the opposite of “time” is not

“instantaneity” but “neverness”—

a concept so difficult he could

scarcely think of additional entries,

resorting instead to phrases from Latin and Greek,

too early for the possibility “Birkenau-Auschwitz.”

Sentence

The body of a starving horse cannot forget the size it was born to.

To Sneezing

Pure master of all our losses,

dissolver of self and its zeals—

we bow before you as newspaper bows to the match.

TO SPARENESS

You lean toward nonexistence,

but have not yet become it entirely.

For this reason, you can still be praised.

The tree unleafing enters your dominion.

An early snowfall shows you abide in all things.

Your two dimensions are line and inclination.

Therefore desire,

though it incinders each mote of its object, itself is spare.

The late paintings of Turner

prove your slender depths without limit.

The beauty too of shakuhachi and cello.

“Winter darkness. Rain. No crickets singing.”

—You are there, pulling hard on the rope-end.

Remembering you, I remember also compassion.

I cannot explain this.

Nor how you live in a teabowl

or in a stone that has spent a long time in a river.

Nor the way you at times can signal your own contradiction,

meaning extra, but not by much—

“Brother, can you spare a dime,” one thin man asks of another.

Any room, however cluttered, gestures toward you,
declaring:

“Here lives this, not that.”

In mathematics, the modest “<” sign gestures toward you.

Your season is surely November,