The Imperfect

is our paradise, Stevens said. 

A quantum leap is not an admission. 

More a strange attractor

if to dream is to be in terms

of that lovely, absent Other.

The secret ethos of right and wrong.

But bifurcations are like traffic lights.

You’ve got particles or waves

depending on the hour of the day.

There are times when love works

and times when it does not,

as with God.

It’s simply not possible to confuse a Mandelbrot

with a Munchausen, although both

expand need exponentially. 

Language after all is not a clarification

but a probability. 

Then factor in desire.

Reincarnation

The first step of course is to die.

You certainly don’t want to simply slip into a coma

or fall asleep where your body might astral project out beyond the limits of the room

or of the poem, or beyond the mind’s ability to see back in at the windows. 

Nor do you want the dream of being awake but unable to move,

as they shovel the dirt over you.  Frozen in the last foul thing you said,

sailing off in the bowl of your skull.

I’d say reincarnation is a sort of chutes and ladders game,

desire and emptiness, and connect the dots like traveling between stars.

And when the monks come looking for you among the rural babies

born the day you left, and you’re asked to play the trinket game,

identify your forgotten past,

it’s not about possessions. 

So if at last you manage to make the jump and find no more than a scrambled omelet of atoms

or bounce back as an insect like in Gregor’s dream

hope for those two weeks the fly normally has on the window pane

for that will seem eternity enough.