​It’s only natural if you’re walking on Phobos
Not to want to overshoot
The mark. Keep walking though. Keep
The view in view. Give some of your loot

To an indigent Martian. Some people leap,
They wonder, Why walk? And there they are,
Floating about that fat red ball.
We crawl across Mars in a fat-wheeled car

And draw electricity from the atmosphere,
The men in the other camp are drinking
Beer. We dig in the soil, we discover
Life. And the other camp is sinking,

They no longer listen to earth, they are hoping
To float, to slide to Ganymede.
Their camp is pestilence and ruin,
Their records speak of song and greed.

Something was always missing, a broken
Telescope, a valve that did
Not join. They knew about space, they had
Ideals and eagerness, a fetid

Gloom remains. Where we are, 
We dig the soil, we seek not stars
But a structure that nothing can touch
And oil that can fill a hundred jars.

​Add light to light, the magma shines
From the crack on the sea floor, the fish
Scatter in every direction, the tube worms
Wave their scarlet fronds. The cloudish

Sea is filled with eggs (inside,
The tiny dots are eyes). A line
Of yellow marks the creeping sun
That soon, you think, will shine,

And even if the day is just
Another day, the fish leap
Onto the deck, to the children, at least,
They are a delight that comes from the deep.

​The pigeon feeds her chicks crop milk,
And so does the father, as matter of fact,
And the orangutan nurses her child
Seven years, and words of wisdom attract

The mind, we grope, we compare, we sleep,
Taste a coffee or a tea, 
And mix that with the smell of rain,
The light upon a memory.

​I had it all wrong. What? You’ll see,
Because all of the paths lined with mint
And trees with sample fruits on their boughs,
The wind and the Septuagint,

They are all new. Inside the eye,
Nanorobots travel through
The vitreous body, and in a quasi
One-dimensional world, two

Iterations come from the 
Electron. Acanthostega creep
Upon the shore, they aren’t shy,
And comets carry, in their steep

Climb across the heavens, amino
Acids, past a proto-world.
Amoeba jiggle, sea worms wiggle,
The shining tentacles, uncurled,

Of the bioluminescent squid,
And a new light shines in the sky,
Is it a yellow dwarf? And here
Another egg, a song, a magpie.

​Chaos tears apart clouds,
Ditto galaxies and electrons,
Sometimes hearts, or memories,
Or gold, titanium or bronze,

And sometimes it swirls among neurons,
Hormones seep through the blood,
Ideas pop of barren fields,
Of tundras melting into mud,

Then all the days, it seems, are swept
Along the line of light and dark
That slides along the spinning globe
And shines across a bounding arc,

And from the night emerges day
And from the day emerges light
And from the light a burst of mind
And blindness, shudder, sudden sight.

​Something bitter, some unexpected thought,
Some collapsing glacier wall, some discovery
Of excited gamma waves, some slip 
On El Capitan, recovery

At the end of a rope, don’t be afraid,
Cling to the wall itself, cling
To molecules, cling to night 
Or wind or to an echoing,

The Brooks River roars in Katmai Park,
The sunlight soaks closed eyelids,
The passage through wind-softened rocks
Contains the murmur of katydids.

​Electron streams rising from deep
Within the planet’s atmosphere
Power Jupiter’s polar auroras,
Poor Jupiter! It’s neither here

Nor there, chaotic storms swirl
And reel. And someone is reeling in his room,
His head bounces against the wall,
“I’ll lock the couch in place with this broom

“Against the window, so the light won’t seep
Through the bleary sides….” Put down the couch,
Think: What is special about my home?
If your head is doubtful, you cannot vouch

That your writing-desk is unique, and you
Race from room to room, the pattern
Of the rooms reflects your soul,
The sun sets, and view the rings of Saturn.

​“Should I go to the concert, the movies, the elevating
Talk, spinning class, walk
On the beach, maybe the solar 
Observatory, the political speech?”

And he suffered from the ads that fluttered
And Facebook and Whatsapp, that strolled in his soul,
Because he wanted to plant a tree deeply,
He was tired of the entire rigmarole--

He wanted his thoughts and movements to be
So deep that on a Januarynight
He would look and say, “Well, that’s my tree,
Dusted white, tinted with moonlight,”

Rooted in the soil of a forest 
Whose silence is so deep that one’s mind
Descends, there is a ravine, a chasm,
A serpent pours out and leaves behind

Its skin, in the depth of the earth are the seeds,
The insect eggs, the navigating
Worms, a rich, brown earth, the mind
Descends into a single waiting

​Not everyone has laws. They come
From life, the crisp autumn comes
With the wind, it comes down from 
The mountains, it shakes the geraniums.

The feral cats don’t notice the fading
Stars, the blur of orange-pink,
And the quiet in the hollow of
The day that speaks, their eyes blink,

They do not see the fantasy, 
The shocking wealth, the sap in the tree,
They think it has always been here, the supple
Wind, the cars and their ennui.

A solar system where the space 
Itself is threatening, the space
Between planets, at opposite ends
Of their orbits. I am rooted in one place,

In Planet X, I despise 
Every tumbling asteroid
And I am mixed with empty hate
And I am tumbling in the void.

The captain of the expedition
Wants to be everywhere,
He wants to be Shakleton 
And Captain Kirk, a debonair

Livingstone, if you wish to explore
The Delaware, the antipodes,
And you cannot stay on Carroll Street
Or go native with the Balinese,

Your starship will shake, your bathysphere
Will sink in murky brine and you
Will see the giant squid, or else,
Upon a crag in Manaslu,

The leaden clouds will press upon
Your hammock, the vulture will hover,
The ultraviolet rays will streak
Ferociously, and you will discover

A fearful contemplation, a question,
“Where am I?” and think, “All
Of these wonders are greater than I am,
I shrink beneath the wind and snowfall.”

We tumbled into the ravine. 
But we’ll get out. Scraped, banged up,
And with a knock on the head that makes you think,
“Who did this? Really, what’s the setup?

“My gosh, I want to have some facts!
I’ll go straight to the top. See if I don’t!”
A wind sweeps down from the hills,
The trees bend, and those that won’t

Snap, their sharp shards look foreign
When the sun comes out. The ants are back,
Repairing their work, the sticklebacks
Are hungry, the boys leap in the haystack.