Poem: Law

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it's just telepathy
embodied when
strangers obey
a law -- in their aggregation

the cars at 4 stops
move as one -- unless an outlaw
makes the design collapse
by moving when the law says no.

A good law is a quasi-nuclear
force drawing us
into harmonious measure
at best frictionless.

Hence the deeper meaning
in Auden's suave
phrasing --
"law is like love".

It's a thing that constrains
and annoys
its victims -- you don't have independence
if your acts synchronize.

But complaining is a token --
a symbol of time
at peace: we complain
like children bickering in a happy home

and there will never be a paradise
without bickering if
you conceive paradise as a place
where humans live.


What do I want
from the law?
Ideally I wouldn't
know or want to know

the law is there.
I would have the luxury
of our living without judging each other.
I would be free

"from" it "within" it.
It would never need to be
called upon but
in not being used would set us free

to float between gears
in grace... but this is hard
to imagine seeing how injustice powers
the forward plunge of our world,

and how compulsively
even good people cheat
each other as if by
nature, as if they can't help it.

Then I would have law
not be a human creation
at all but spread above and below
the human,

well beyond
anything a poet
can understand
or write about.

It would encompass
the dead and gone
not just those few of us
who hold life's microphone.

Law would be love
when those most broken
of all have
their tiny portion

of I want to say existence
but it must be
some form of transcendence
we can align with, not see,

an alignment so incomplete
that we
die by law, yet pray for it
to come in its way: that is, completely.

*

Poem: The voice

*

Where did he hear
God's voice or did
he hear it indeed, did he ever
hear a voice not his but so closely related

to his own
most intimately
hidden -- his own unable-to-be-spoken
hopes of what his own life might be

that the voice lay in his tongue
and not on his ear -- was not imposed
by circumstances commanding
but simply said what needed to be said?

It was no second you inside you
telling you what
to do
and what not,

no no, not so split.
The voice was full of a consent --
his own -- but it
was really consent, it was not constraint.

He would hear the voice then lose it
but the swing of the loss
kept him chasing the part not lost:
its rightness -- looseness --

the seam of confidence
embedded in the darkness
as if mere chance
had slipped and become conscious.

Was it possible? You could really know
what to do and lean
within this feel of assurance that held you
close and guided you in?

Suppose silence were like little wells
where God stored messaging
in virtual particles
through which our day to day swung?

How could one hear this?
Surely the body
acting would catch this voice --
or mask it more likely.

The trick would be not to cover it
with chatter but to listen
to the X squeezing the heart
for a terrible beat then gone.

The trick would be to stay open
for the can't-measure
length of endurance even
to begin to hear.

So... the poet's ear was open like
a bird's
hungry beak.
And God fed it with mysterious words.

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