Quantum Recombinations

Robert Ronnow
The Imaginary i

Quantum Recombinations

1

Keeping the town’s maintenance crew employed
unclogging the sewer system and the poem,
by poem I mean anything by which we
instantiate a vision effected
artificially by intelligent beings
who wanted such transformations
to happen. No election can distract
attention from the fact we did not do
enough to change mankind’s trajectory.
Uniquely American, unclogging
incorporates Irish jig, English step dance,
African high kick, Cherokee stomp dance.
Slow dance, housework done (dusting for ghosts),
the garbage out (garbage out, come on in!)
and the Ukraine girls really knock me out.

2

The Union of Concerned Scientists insists
annihilation has never been nearer.
What can we do except take our best guess?
McIntosh dies in the desert fighting Indians,
the Fedex gal leaves an anthrax package,
in a thousand years baseball’s played solely
by genetically engineered primates.
Traffic sloshes to work. That’s how it goes,
food shortages, weather crises, police patrols,
genetics, prosthetics, antibiotics,
plastics, statistics, school science shows.
If you cannot accept this, forget it all.
How broadly we define community
says it all. We must devote our present
to our future existence, or absence.

3

Them fat bearded tattooed pissed off white bros
v. them dark-skinned mustachioed shitheads.
I like them, work with them, give them serious
thought, nevermind them, feed them, know them,
none of them, seven billion of them,
expressions emanating from them mortal
minds, them tiny tits, them missiles that don’t work,
them gooks before them, not only them, what
makes them special, name them as if I had
made them myself, leave them behind in sandstone
time, I want them to be angry instead
of me, encourage them to defend our
allies and interests, in them there’s a fire,
forget them, stack them by the railroad tracks,
teach them, admire them, defy them, love ‘em!

4

Ran into Li Po at the post office.
Amen to men reciting lines, reading
scriptures, in authority, outside the self,
who have learned or know how to live, who look
for machinery in motion, whose modus
operandi isn’t fear, who dedicate
their lives to losing their lives for us,
remarkable souls who maintain self-control
among the unentertained multitude.
Buddhas with jobs and spouses and houses,
who have studied the matter and have something
to say, philosophers who distinguish
sentences from a mere heap of words,
lonesome souls, virtuosos, performing
calculations and interpretations,
who want recombinations to happen.

5

A.I., i.e. thee and I, e.g.
taking and trading. Why the difficulty
adapting? Bureaucracy v. blue skies.
Sewer system v. humor in the cholera.
To forget and be forgotten we don’t
need to know your politics, x’s and o’s,
wishes and curses. Someone tell a joke.
Innumerable wonders, it’s woke not
to be innumerate or illiterate.
As doomed individuals drop from sight
new enthusiasts associate. Late
in life and early on the straight way may
be lost, tragedy wrought to the uttermost,
Walking is the answer to almost Spring.
Walk over the bridge. Walk with war buddies.
Walk the wilderness. Walk the heartless city.

6

A yeti, a caveman and a sapien
walk into a bar. Bones and tendons,
genes and memes, eyeglasses and hearing aids,
bandaids for when what happens happens.
Beautiful and incorrigible,
deeply in debt, indentured to courage
and devotion, having nothing to teach,
their comedies and tragedies outlast
the holocaust. Relentless laughter
at the absurdity of work, events
keep piling up, having not done the things
they wanted to do or found the greatness
of a single, clear definition,
confused about change but colonizing
the planet, doing a good job being you.

7

Peace is, for now, out of reach. So be it.
Sirens scream, fear prevents full knowledge
of experience. Stop making believe
God is the answer, love is the answer.
Control, insofar as you are able,
your reactions to the news and weather
although beauty may be found in every
American town and the world over.
Hope is the asshole just doing his job
and raising a family while his neighbor
is beheaded. Algorithmic logic
of a passionately computing species.
As we travel away from vast green Earth
the gaggle and babble simplifies
to a silence so profound it puts you
in your resting place with a killing cold.

8

My son went to a 10-day meditation
retreat in Idaho. I admire
his passion for mental discipline but
never have I understood life’s meaning.
Not to say perhaps there is no purpose.
A mere minute of breathing awareness
beats politics as entertainment,
citizens aka comrades in labor,
mosquitoes aka relentless
mindless motherfuckers. Nevertheless,
the decision to march to war in rows
and back in columns cannot be left
to confused, obtuse gods. This too shall pass,
Dad said. He also said his years fighting
Japs in New Guinea were his best by far.

9

I will always know New York City
better than grasses and cactuses,
fluorescence better than the full moon,
hits of the 80s better than birdsong.
A universe so large its least event
can consume one in a nanosecond
and so small it fits within a crevice
of the brain with room to spare. 4 a.m.
plunge the toilet. Nothing but the job, Bob.
Weekend toddler television: Caillou
and Big Red Dog. Is Caillou hairless
to distinguish him from other kids
or to illustrate alopecia?
And what can be said about BRD?
My bald kids love dogs.

10

I had serious post-adolescent
blues and wanted many girls to come up
to my room. There in the dark candlelight
we shed our delusions, they more quickly
than I, but now we see eye to eye.
The final warming will force trees north,
erasing habitat and opening tundra.
What animal will migrate with maples?
It is I, New Englander! I learned from
the ancient Chinese poets each poem should
start with a weather report. O western wind,
you old torturer, Percy Shelley
make your poems shorter! The gummy gritty streets,
the exhaust and you exhausted in them,
are nature saying bye bye bad guy
the scarecrow with a scythe is not a fake.

11

When the female baboon presents, the male
baboon almost always consents. Social,
sentient, so sure are they of who they are.
We’re slow to organize, to recognize
the seriousness of our situation
but I promise once the steel is in our eyes
there will be a crushing of your cities.
The majority can be terribly wrong.
Kill all others can be their death song.
A self-imposed silence wouldn’t hurt us.
When Russia joins Europe as a peaceful
democracy that will be the end of history.
Or is WWIII for the soul of the world
already underway? I’m strangely happy.
To act and react is itself a fever.

12

This afternoon a man I admire
is coming to the house. He reads no poems.
He says no prayers. He can fix the furnace.
He knows how. I’ve always been attracted
to the Buddhist concept of inaction.
To do less and eat less than might otherwise
be called for. To not necessarily
sacrifice each day for another day.
To survive only as many more years
as there are petals on a randomly
picked (ox-eye) daisy. How extraordinarily
beautiful does Spring passing into summer
have to get before you’ll admit you’re happy?
It takes deep disquiet to be a poet,
to know nothing and do it well. Be
a shooting star shooting for a black hole.

13

Violence will sometimes be necessary.
When the opponent’s implacable intent
is to exterminate, don’t wait until
too late, fight honorably, hate. Poets
scatter when a senator, governor
or president enters just as priests believe
in a higher power. Nihilism is despair
or perhaps an illusion that I share:
a world made perfect, orderly and fair.
Might dark matter have a rich inner life?
What is an appointment but an agreement
to manipulate change and arrive
on intersecting interstellar waves?
Doris Day, too tanned, too coifed to be a
governess. Beowulf, too busy slaying
monsters for governance. Elect Yoda.

14

Nature which has been dating life forms
a few billion years and tried out trilobites,
dinosaurs and now primates, has frankly
been disappointed. An extinction
is underway to rival the Permian.
WWII was the quintessential total
war. The level of mobilization,
the battlespace being contested,
the armies, navies and air forces
raised through conscription, the targeting
of civilians, disregard for collateral
damage and the unrestricted aims
of the belligerents marked total war
on an unsurpassed scale—so far. Keep hope
alive by ignoring probabilities.

15

Stripped of home and spouse, who am I? That is
the simple, elegant question. Is it
a crowded world or an empty life?
The day begins and your meditation ends.
Silence is prerequisite for sanity.
What a night of love can’t change. If you want
to experience the magic moments to come
just open this box of whatifs, whatnots.
Interstellar space invades our atmosphere,
those Kelvins mix with our greenhouse gases
to produce nuance, survival and cell phones,
the plot lines, costumes and makeup for
The Walking Dead and The Sopranos.
Some of us are gonna miss Game of Thrones’
last season. Mortality makes us divine.

16

I am constantly looking for assurance
that I’ve made a difference. A disciplined
indifference is the best defense. The best
pizza in Troy, best chicken in Chicopee.
A hoagy from the place where will and power
are one. It’s in the actuarial tables:
Death is indifferent to what hide he tans,
Life crushes men like flies. Good old Chaucer,
what a jokester, the best laugh’s death’s, toaster.
But I’m confident Americans
will give the world another example
of how to slam dunk a Mussolini
or Hitler wannabe, if necessary.
All literature leads back to the Iliad
where the human meets the divine and finds
it wanting. Wanting this, wanting that.

17

A man can wait his whole life for a vision
when his whole life was the vision. Google,
gape, goggle, glare, ogle, gawk, gaze, glimpse.
There’s joy in failure to prosper, failure
to thrive, failure to improve, failure to save
nations and people, failure to survive.
Failure's the problem you want. As a tutor
my purpose is to help students find pleasure
in chemistry and history, their cell structure.
Every year or two Eddie Bishop corners
me at basketball and tells me poetry
is meaningless to him. In Grand Gulch,
I’m whispering to a cactus when Chester
gimps by, yaks about Sasquatch and mermen,
hot chicks and our potty-mouthed president.
Apocalypse or situation comedy, which?

18

The right size room for a poem or a plan
is the inside of your head. There you can be
alone with planetary citizens,
the imaginary i, and denizens
of inconvenience stores. I won’t get
to the truth, or my truth, before I die,
the nameless one, the one that’s never known.
It’s been proven time and time again, there’s
no there there, you live until you're whacked.
The pecking order, IMDb’s ratings,
that’s an order, overcome a deepening
solitude. Exercise to philosophize.
Her lips against my lips. War ships. Waiting,
the future’s irresistible rather
than merely effete, each leaf out and Jack
in boxers way up high in the Sierry Petes.

19

All I need is a loaf of bread, a cold
Spring, the wind in the oaks and one long
unbroken soliloquy. And to lay
my head against my sleeping wife. Some
initial knowledge to go with the data,
sufficient weaponry to win a war,
interpret the Chinese master’s wisdom
or endure his disapproval. We say change
but we mean nonexistence. We say tyranny
but we mean a foolish consistency.
I say Other but I don’t believe in ghosts
or me, my soul and i. Or A.I. We
can’t know what we’re doing until it’s done.
Tell me your story and I’ll tell you mine.
I need someone and do not hide it, trees
to cast their night spells, cities to move the plot.

20

I’m old enough now not to hafta care
if I’m flat-chested or big-breasted.
The key is seeing how similar two things are.
The right is fearful they’ll be sent to gulag
while the left foresees the gas and stalag.
I’ve got a bad case of anomie, me,
the end of faith in which we mistake
acts of total war for acts of naked saints.
Don’t talk to me about love, dear, until
you ain’t had sex in over 20 years.
You do not wear shorts in the Sonoran,
no matter how hot it gets, it’s long pants
and a long-sleeved shirt. Past the boundary
into wilderness I feel unbounded joy.
A blank, unpainted space represents spirit.

21

Peg took pictures of horseshoe crabs mating.
I was embarrassed by the spectacle,
faith in the future I don’t share although
we went so far as to have children ourselves.
Happiness is dangerous, luck runs out
silently even if we be alert.
Never have we been fierce warriors,
there’s no way to survive this habitat
without nonplussed, perplexed, perplexful leaders.
Bipartisan romanticism.
The transcendental nature of nature.
Only a paper moon can fix yr brakes.
One must let go, lack data. Anesthesia,
irreversible hiccups, lonely discipline,
tide by tide and storm by storm the blind
combined will of us all that surrounds us.

22

People’s eyes cloud over when one talks
poetry. On the beach or at thanksgiving
even politics is more politic.
Prayer gets you where you need to go whereas
versification confuses, offers
disinformation and misdirection.
Reading aloud is obsolete except
your unpaid bills. At weddings the betrothed
compose their own corny or banal poems
ending with a kiss. This looks like jump to me.
Simply tell the story, if you have one,
nothing need be done but stay alive
down to the depths of material life.
Everything cannot be said or done, the
best that can be done is be where you are.

23

If they push forward, we’ll back away,
if they leave a space, we'll fill the space.
Above all, stay together, if someone falls
help them up. If the police riot, stand
quietly, do not abandon the bloodied
and broken. Learn the names of our oppressors.
How’s the family? Do you live nearby
or commute? Did you watch the game last night,
seen any good movies lately? Which church,
mosque or synagogue do you belong to?
Questions quantize the situation.
As the chanting and orders to disperse
escalate, contribute silence and slow
movements. We may be hurt or worse as were
patriots at the Boston Massacre
or Bunker Hill, but I think we’ll be ok.

24

If all is well I’ve wasted my time
imagining otherwise. To get lucky
you gotta be careful first, throw slow strikes.
Clean air and water, America
the seeing eye dog not the junkyard dog.
Dandelion of course, also huckleberry,
a sparrow hawk in midair and juniper
the source of all penumbra. Open
the border with Mexico, let labor flow
like capital! Do less till one thing’s done well.
Old and yet so young, what one question
is the key to what God wants? Grace that
features an afterlife even as a joke
is a betrayal of reality.
What is this dizziness, uneasiness?
Am I AI or photosynthesis?

25

To build a house first you dig a hole
purple trillium aka wake robin
wood anemone aka windflower
sing cuccu the joy of making life is new.
Lovely sand mandalas or sand castles,
bridges and subways, heavy equipment
towed up the street. O to be great, dissipate!
Dad said why not write a spiritual self-help
book make a little dough and do some good.
I ply my arts all day alone, how much
tinnitus can you handle? Governance
is best when we make small moves, wake up early,
and behoove an empty belly holy.
Will the machines do the work? A concrete
saw, a muddy backhoe, a logging truck.
O to fail well, someone tell a dirty joke!

26

I am only slightly ashamed to say
when I see news photos of rocks thrown
at ICE agents I get excited rooting
for the rioters. How to explain this
position to pacifists and legalists.
Wildfires north and west, the sky
unnaturally red hours before sunset.
Humans keep popping out of the heaven
of animals in a made up magical
mental state that imperfectly comports
with reality. On this trajectory,
nuclear assets moving into place,
apocalypse is a probability.
What can you or I or that rabble do?
I have given up thinking I can make a
difference. I have let death into my life.

27

You get a limited number of long walks,
kill your fair share of mammals crossing
the road. My wife, for one, is not convinced
of my savior potential. Invincible
as a nation or eviscerated?
Sushi or burrito. Not the worst
and not the best over which I have
no control. After reading the headlines
I need a good laugh, a kind of despairing
unwillingness to look at anything
closely or slowly. Never gonna be
a Taylor Swift fan, give me two Sonnys,
Stitt and Rollins, but if she’s unselfish
in her spandex sequin space suit who am I
to complain she’s not Walt Whitman? Ukraine,
however, has no choice. It’s fight or die.

28

Sadness of summer, silence of winter,
I’m always on the lookout for good news.
The Russian Federation collapses
and Russia joins the European Union.
In this the peace is supreme, millions
losing the argument with themselves.
Open border clerical error,
indifferent death social cohesion,
enlightened levity patient confusion.
Man made the town and the emergency
room, supermarket, the self, the polity
and the city, the environment in which
experiments can be savored and dispersed.
Wait for the el, snow on the Sonoran,
the train in the rain, change in the weather.
To get around fast, practice perfect rest.

29

To oppose the dictates of the dictator
and hope police don’t aid the torturers,
what would be the indicators things are
getting better? No bombarding cities
or beheading neighbors. That is the sound
of shoulders shrugging, no one knows nothing.
Building a bunker under the ballroom,
gotta say lotta good that did Hitler.
Who’s gonna milk the cows and pick the grapes
without undocumented immigrants?
Do you care yet, commensurate with yr mood,
to fill the day with cheerful and truthful
expression? My funny, friendly, earthy,
tattooed supermarket cashier confirms
there’s life after empire and no afterlife.

30

Wake first light before the world fills up
impatient with peace and contemplation.
To be. To be. Can it be done with grace
and dignity? Light the fires, wield the
chain saw, drive the cat. My anonymity
runs deep dull and dark as a dream in which
I endeavor to avoid the cops, the courts,
the crisis intervention team. You’d think
you’d want drama that emulates tv
but today all I want to see is actors
not breaking up their lines to weep. Factual,
dispassionate renditions of what happened,
WWII, the Civil War, Grant’s and Churchill’s,
even Ben Franklin’s, account of events.
Solzhenitsyn, slavery, separating
children forever from their parents.

31

Of course joy, you gotta write about joy
to give your readers hope. A typical
urban hellscape, the middle class in cars,
the indigent off their feet in the streets,
Jim Wright called America hell-on-earth.
I have to laugh, keep life interesting
by solving problems that can’t be solved.
You gotta right to be mentally ill
and to sing the blues. Without free and fair
elections how will we correct our mistakes?
Not via air travel. Not on tv.
Will my letter to the editor be
in the funny pages? Did I send it to
the wrong address? Never may the anarchic
man’s thoughts be my thoughts. Not one. After all,
how you feel accounts for nothing at all.

32

First light on your last day. The desert waits
sweet with fruits and sharp with thorns, sunrise
over mountains or moonrise over Bronx.
When the republic experiences
psychotic episodes AI refers
you to the I Ching—stay in your foxhole.
Everyone’s offended by everything
despite the virtue of most citizens.
Not that you can count on them at the airport.
Some are willing to torture but others are
our customers, waiting and suffering,
disappearing in powerful time’s grip,
working hard and playing hard, pressed into
the smallest possible space—the Planck length.
Brittlebush, rabbitbrush, blackbrush, burning bush,
salvation in the details in the desert.

33

I’ve lost many friends and both of my sons
because I thought my thoughts at the time
more compelling than care of the soul
(should such a thing exist). I’ve lived alone
in the midst of marriage and the city
and wondered is this how others have lived?
To know their minds (if they didn’t resist)
by candlelight or first light or fluorescence
might satisfy my curiosity.
Having substituted economy
for comradery, few people achieve
their potential in the face of history,
society and their personal flaws.
As we approach life’s bitter ending
are they thinking of me as I thought of them
with a mixture of regret and indifference?

34

Ours is a comedy and a tragedy,
the work boring, easy, slow, fulfilling.
Day by day goes by without poetry.
It’s blue v. gray, or red v. whatever,
Star Trek v. Battlestar Galactica,
anomie v. democracy, Ukes v. Orcs,
iambic pentameter v. I got rhythm,
humility v. perspicacity,
our present v. our future existence.
You must weave among the prickly pears
and cholla, admire ocotillo
but don’t let it clip your ear, watch for
teddy bear and hedgehog near to the ground,
find some shade under a paloverde
as bees and flies pollinate creosote
v. ice and snow far as the eye can see.

35

Yeats and every extant poet has bet
a poem is a living, breathing, growing thing
that outlasts the holocaust even when
the page this poem is on burns. No kidding.
You really can’t know for certain whether
people are sapiens, zombies or machines.
Binary thinking isn’t bad per se,
a survival tool that evolved to be
a heuristic aid for making decisions
in a threat-filled environment, however,
it’s a cognitive bias that reduces
situations to two opposing options
either or, good bad, right wrong, us them,
something nothing, being doing, input output,
whatever forever, twist and shout.

36

Never say never say never again.
The good life's all around us, not to say
there is no significance or purpose.
Effortless mastery, Bobby baby.
Outside the circle of sex, the calculus,
the chestnut, the cactus, the coral, all
we do not know about our nation’s history,
the exterminating terminator.
Great buildings are built that nature destroys
with a little wind, water, fire, air.
All things fall and are built again by men
in hardhats who voted for this president.
We’ve got to live together and not get shot
by ISIS or ICE or anyone else.
Love that's learned to love from earlier loves.