Intelligent Observers

It is comforting to think
that the cat's eye nebula
exists, that if we had not
looked into it, it might
be something else or nothing
at all, but because we 
looked into it and named
it the cat's eye nebula,
it exists now.
A man I've never seen
before in my life 
stops by my office door
and says, "There you are."
I look up. He reddens.
"You're not Lisa."
"No," I want to say,
"but for a moment
there I must have been."

Funeral Poem

I want condors to argue over my liver.
I want to lose an ass cheek to a Komodo dragon.
I want for an elephant's trunk to probe my skull,
for an eyelash to lie like Cleopatra
high on the mandible of an ant.
I want for the spiral inside a shark
to wring the blood out of my heart
and mash each string of muscle into mush
gummed by the intestine, only the hardest bits
shat out and nibbled at by wrasse and banded shrimp.
Prize me, bacteria. Find me choice.
May morels pop from my scalp
and piss out galaxies of spores,
replicating minutely, flagrantly
at the edges of things like a fractal.
Jackal, bear your teeth for me.
Hunch and charge (oh, to be loved
that much), and, flies, compound me
piecemeal into a moving glory --
where to after this? Where to?