ON THE VELOCITY OF SOULS

Old souls tend
to gravitate toward cities,

dull coins, museums.
Wanting to sense more

waning power.
New souls prefer

bucolic landscapes:
lakes, manageable

woods, suburbs.
Of course, both new and old souls

will one day cross paths
like a changing of the guards,

maybe even nod, trading
news of ice ages, rain forests-

cum-deserts, a recent
heinous crime.    

Plagues, jokes, undying
lovers, genocides.

Though never true friends,
old and new souls, they

respect each other.
Unless one is still

angry at the judgment the other
passed eons ago— 

You never really know
who you are, will be,

or were.

***

ALL LOVE IS IMMIGRANT

There is another other
in the other of every

Another

***

Sweet Men (audio)

*

from WHORLED

On the other side of the world, there is a language I have never heard
It is beautiful, and in this dying tongue, there are words for Love and God
that resemble Bread and Wing
Or another forest language in which Mother and Knife

equal Drawer and Sing
And Island Wood is somewhere Desert Milk
And Berry, elsewhere is a Door
And if you added up all these dying words, and the people who speak them

All their memories, histories, and lessons
All their gods, jokes, rituals, and recipes
If you learned and stirred them, over and again, until
each utterance became a star, a new footprint, the marrow of a poem—





Broadside from Red Dragonfly Press: "This excerpt from the title poem of Ed Bok Lee's Whorled (Coffee House Press, 2011), a poem aimed at a "speaker in a future age" as elegy for the extinct and endangered languages of our contemporary earth, was printed on the occasion of the author's visit to St. Olaf College January 18, 2012."

*

from Real Karaoke People:

Seasons of Hair

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