Revenants at Dawn, House of the Old Year, 31 December 2016

Ghosts of buildings haunted me,
Memories of rooms and paint,
Particular thick railings
On stairs into the basement,
The kinds of window casings,
The lights, the leaks, the cracked bricks,
All exact to me, all gone,

Nothing to revisit but
A handful of photographs
And the distortions inside
The nautilus of my skull:
My father's house, prep-school dorm,
Hospital where I was born.
Ghosts only haunt by absence.

Best Friends, Angel Canyon, Utah, 30 December 2016

Even the bent and busted can, if daring
And sufficiently stupidly reckless,
Grab a mini-odyssey, spontaneous small adventure
From the tight-lipped, iron grip of the edge. Strive,
Seek, not to yield, all that malarkey that somehow
Feels apt. Body pulled self together, or the other
Way around, and with a holiday fifty in the wallet
Drove daughter into the canyons for a lark. Wove
Through flashing shadows, sun on snow, ice
Running with water, road ribbon running
With tourists taking vacation pictures of each other
Against the envy-inducing backdrops of great beauty,
Crowding like sheep with cameras to get pics of bighorn sheep
Browsing near Checkerboard Mesa, one horned kid dashing
Spryly through the flock of people like an angel unawares,
One young woman clutching a tablet and literally dancing
With glee to be pictured with the real sheep. Nature. Miracle.
Bro-dude sledders wading hip-deep upslope to toboggan
Down Checkerboard Mesa itself. Giant tour bus disgorging
Hordes at the Thunderbird diner on the east turn-off.
Just us and a few pick-ups heading past Coral Pink Dunes
To Kanab, daughter demanding a chance to play the iPad,
Father demanding daughter help watch for deer and learn
To savor and absorb the view. Not everywhere has mountains.
Why? Where did their mountains go? We reached the sanctuary,
Said hello to a receptionist and a rescued fat lizard being taken
Out for some sun and a walk, then drove to the Bunny House
For our tour of the hutches, the lion-headed, the flop-eared,
The pink-eyed, the sable-furred, the friendly and the frightened.
One other family arrived for the tour, serendipitously including
A girl near my daughter's age, ready to play. A snowball fight,
A snow man, some climbing of ancient junipers while we waited,
Parents talking quietly, half-watching the new best friends,
Half happy to ignore them. Then into the rabbit warren
With the earnest young women who volunteered, the ones
Content to change alfalfa, clip rabbit nails, clean rabbit soil.
Save them all. The rabbits were rabbits, clearly sleek and well-fed.
The girls cooed over them, the floppy-eared and the two new
Rescues that were in a cage "bonding" the best. Before long,
The girls had bounded back outside and were running wild.
End of tour. Parental goodbyes, compliments to each child.
One last whim back at the entrance, a sudden turn to Arizona
Instead of back through Zion and home. Not yet. A stop
In the desert, at the sign by the side of the road for auto,
Beer, guns, and ammo. The last of the holiday fifty for gas,
Snacks, and a lottery ticket. O defiance! O hope, divine delusion!
Returning only then, the world visited, the world spited,
The world, or one small corner, navigated, composed
Now and composing this sort-of poem in the head, in the light,
The daughter in back defeating the bad wolf and the wicked witch.
The road rising and falling gently home, in good repair.
When it's almost all gone for good, but still enough,
Especially when it's almost all gone but still, for a little while
More, enough, it's enough. It's wonderful. It's enough.

A Bed and a Window, Winderland, 29 December 2016

The light in the invalid window was all the reason
An invalid needed to feel good about the day, about the days
In bed, quintessential nest of selfishness and sacrifice alike.
What's sadder, happier, sappier than being bed-ridden?
No place lonelier or more intimately social, no place more
Removed from or central to rotating casts of peopled planets.
This window faced the winter sun as squarely as the days
Allowed, low and straight south. Hanging plants basked
While just outside, the bare-twigged bushes glowed with snowmelt,
Rustled with hungry finches and sparrows. This
Could not last. All victories are pyrrhic, and before dawn
The heart could pound the invalid awake with fear
That the wind was up, the power had been shut off, that it was
Already the day of days, the one that would enter the ice.
Yesterday, after just such a predawn fright, after sun returned
And the heart had calmed for another hour, the invalid's daughter,
Back from a walk, fresh-faced from the cold, noticed, delighted,
The delicate imprint, the exquisite silhouette of feathers outspread
That had been left by the powdered wings of a bird
Who had hit the window in full flight, leaving behind a dusty angel.
Just so, but today the window spilling sun again, the warm bed,
And the reading of old poems praising the light in still life.

Gambler's Gethesame, Dark Water, Utah, 28 December 2016

"Reader, do you think it is a terrible thing to hope
When there really is no reason to hope at all?"
The universe and I have never seen eye to eye, never
Quite been able to coordinate successfully. I
Can't seem to take the universe sufficiently
Seriously, and the universe can't seem to take
Any notice of me. It's not that we've been hung up
On impossibilities. Except for a different universe,
I've never wanted for anything the universe couldn't deliver
Me. It's my insane craving for the ordinary-but-
Unlikely-to-happen-to-me, all my vacationing
At the risk of belief, my insistence on dreaming the fortuitous
Improbability, the extremely statistically insignificant
That's always there, somewhere, but can't ever seem to align
With me. I'm well aware it probably won't and doesn't have to,
But it could. It could and it hasn't and it haunts me. Maddening
Improbability tempts me to defy it in all its indifferent glory.
As for other people's magicking, other people's bargains
And bromides and tight bonds with their ancestors,
Their common sense and deities, if an uncommon
God really wants me so badly, he can't just let me
Hang myself. He has to come and get me.

Good Night, Mrs. Nast, and Thanks, Wherever You Are, 27 December 2016

The hooks of shame can find no purchase in this lad with the trick shoes.
The Slavic stewardess, survivor of a 33,000 foot fall, dies. The after life
Of the afterlife amounts to forty-four years. The life before
The after life is everything and forever and is nothing much
Fretting about being never. Advice for the dying: ignore
Advice from the dying. Or for the dying. None of it comes from anyone
With any prior experience of being dead. Yes, smiles the world,
I'm beautiful. I'm exquisite. Look at me all you want, but what
Do you think you're going to do? There is no morally
Superior place in this world. There is no superior place
In this world. There is no place. And I say to myself,
What a wonderful world. Wish I had less to say. I shall.
But you know the corollary. Or you would, but you're gone.
You're right: we were wrong. This is not the world. The world's past the fall.

Cryptographer's Lullaby, Voynich Lane, Utah, Boxing Day 2016

Nobody was more massive, more pointless,
More less read, more more less, than was my balneology.
Behold! Herbarium, towering lingam, cornstalk of the Pueblo,
Idiot graphic of rock art's indeterminacy, song

Of the male of a little species grown, momentarily,
Great, greater than the cedars and the cetaceans.
Are we done? I want to curl up my ego like a bedroll
And hide in a natural alcove like a Peruvian sacrifice

Or a bog victim for a thousand and a thousand years.
There's an insert, a tip-in in the folio of the master,
The mistress, the one who created the complete, compacted
Facsimile of a poem, a hymn, a book of prayer in the unknown.

I have finished the song I inherited from others than
My parentage. Here I am. Gone. Oh, if only, if only.

Noesis Noeseos Noesis Noel, Winderland, 25 December 2016

Imagination's the world's wickedest invention.
A late acquaintance once put it this way:
It's not that I want to die. I absolutely do not
Want to die. But if I have to die, and I do,
And if I have to know I have to die, and I do,
Then I wish I were already dead. Now she was,
That long, long-lost acquaintance, therefore no more,
Therefore no longer having to imagine it, as she had,
And there I was, counting the years one way
And the days the other, reading about a long-dead
Philosopher's elaborate, immobile god, chief
Of a celestial hierarchy of divine lights and spheres,
Capable only of thinking about thinking about thinking,
The unmoved mover. The unmoved mover was the object of all desire.
It moved without moving itself because others craved it
And so moved constantly toward it. Hunger
Was only love of the unmoved mover. But
Was that unmoved mover therefore everything or nothing,
Death or more dying? For what does anything hunger? Repetition?
Life at least asked no such questions before imagination
Started looking for stories and signs in the stars.
Why did the astrologers head to Bethlehem, storywise?
To keep moving. Keep moving, blues falling down like hail.
Gold, frankincense, and myrrh, tokens for a later age to imagine,
Maintenance, repair, supplies, all means to moving
To something that remains unmoved with respect to its hunger
To keep moving. Today was the biggest holiday of the year,
At least it used to be when I was my parents' child,
And I asked myself, how many of these exact days
Of this exact holiday do you, body, remember? How many
Will the daughter for whom we performed this day,
Believing in what we could not see or feel? Do we have to?

Christmas Eve Storm in Zion Canyon, 2016

Strings of cars wound through the wet snow,
Holidayers, mostly staying at the Lodge no doubt.
The world hummed two contrasting parts,
Come in, come in, get out, get out.

It was not forecast to start this fast.
There'd been a chance it wouldn't fall at all.
This was a desert and a desert in drought.
The world hummed two contrasting parts,
Come in, come in, get out, get out.

As snows go, it wasn't nothing, but by midday, still,
It was nothing much. Sedans and tour busses slowed
But stayed on the roads, although the rocks began
Here and there to let go and slide into the route.
The world hummed two contrasting parts,
Come in, come in, get out, get out.

The river was a slick, brown snake squirming
Through the closing banks as if the earth had winter hands
And was trying to grab it and keep it still. Not a chance.
Water, more water, was all the grip the weather could commit,
And water, like any garden truth, snakes or not, will always out.
The world hummed two contrasting parts,
Come in, come in, get out, get out.

Body sat among filigreed cottonwoods, letting
The cold wet the head. Silver, black, chocolate trees
At that early stage of a soft, warmish winter storm,
Every least twig detailed in clinging white, but not
Bent from weight or ice quite, arched overhead. Snow
Covered the soles, then the ankles, but the hikers wandered out.
The world hummed two contrasting parts,
Come in, come in, get out, get out.

It would get colder as it quit. The forecast promised
A Christmas of ice. The stores would close. The lids
Of the cloudy, sleepy sky would open on black
And stars, hard and sharp. I watched the steady, soothing pattern
Of that wool, that quasicrystalline, aperiodic, knowledgeable swirl.
I wanted it, wanted this calm accumulation to extend forever.
But calm accumulating forever was not what my storm was about.
The world hummed two contrasting parts,
Come in, come in, get out, get out.

Ampersand Canyon, Zion, 23 December 2016

Charlevoix, Michigan, October 1980.
A young fool had run away from a good gig,
From being a freshman at Princeton. He sat
On a ratty couch in a cold and run-down house
As it snowed, already, outside the uncurtained window,
A broke and unskilled and unwelcome guest
Given shelter for the sake of the cute girl he traveled with,
And he propped a spiral notebook on his knees,
And he tried to write a story he could sell. He couldn't
Even make it past the first page. The sensation
Was one of lifting weights, of stooping and shoveling snow
From those bent and surgically pinned-together knees.
It was a feeling as leaden as the lowering sky. It was not
A sensation of being lost in another world, of joy.
It was not even anything he could bear to reread to himself
Although he felt that the premise was a good one.
And he never did finish it, and he never did quit it either,
And it never did get there, and it never would be.
And thirty-six years later? Still composed of what could
Not support him, he parked by the remains of a waterfall
On the third day of a desert winter and no real snow, yet,
The first storm predicted for actual Christmas, possibly.
One reading of the tarot holds that the staff of the Fool
And the staff of the Hermit are the same, and that
The former character is the younger version of the latter,
A daylight wanderer, packed light, small sack of past on that staff
Over the jaunty shoulder bowed low by the years
By the time of the Hermit, now a night wanderer, needing a lamp
And carrying nothing but that lantern and himself on the stick,
Too much past to portage anymore, not enough discovery.
Three dozen circuits of the seasons around the sun
And he never did complete that story, never did stop
Searching for a wintry something, heavy as snow, as lead,
And he never did support himself, and he never did
Get home. By the rock he sat with his staff in his hands
And peered up the cliff as the cold water dripped, less and
Less descending into the storyless fangs of old ice and fresh snow.

Acid Solution, Rainy Highway, Utah, 22 December 2016

Because wisdom is not problem solving,
Wisdom offers no solutions, except the dour
Observation that, whatever it is you're looking for,
It can't be found by living more. That's why
No sage so wise as a corpse on the floor.
No need to accept this, so long as you have problems
To resolve, sufferings to conquer, salvation
And enlightenment at the back of your thoughts.
When the pupil is ready, or maybe before, the master
Arrives to rap on your door. Problem no more.

Nothing and Nothing Much, East and West Zion, Winter Solstice 2016

In search of nothing, my one true love, body
Loaded up the car and headed east into Zion
On a grey first winter morning. How to get nowhere
From now here? No one in the tunnel though the heart
Of the park. Few tourists and then fewer on the east side,
Up high, where thin flags of old snow lay surrendered.
No mule deer, no bighorn sheep, a raven, no condors.
Parked the car in junipers. Studied the grey skies.
Ate a packaged snack. Waiting to die, waiting
To run out of borrowed supplies, that's no way to die.
Consider the options. There's nothing and there's
Nothing much. Nothing is accessible only by metaphors,
Numbers, ideas, lies, and death--the same. Most people
Don't want to go there, drag their feet, finally get dragged
Over the cliff in a hospital bed, maybe a gun at their heads.
Most people, body as self included, get by on nothing much.
Nothing much is pretty much mostly everything that happens,
With small pockets of startling exceptions. Nothing much
Going on in the cedars in the high country, for instance,
Most of yesterday, last autumn afternoon, direct sun
Sinking as it warmed west Zion, not even tourists, squirrels,
Or flies to disturb it, no singing birds. Once in a while,
The long, withdrawing roar of a jet at high altitude. Once,
A great commotion of wild turkeys roused to ruckus,
Out of view, making a noise suspiciously like rambunctious
Joy in the unseeable distance. Then, nothing much, mostly, again.

Reliquary of the Magi, Kolob Terrace Road, 20 December 2016

All delights were delights of the flesh,

Then as now, and all sorrows likewise.

Heat fell through the colorless window

Since replaced by random rainbowed bits

And sank through my breathing, pulsing chest.

It was as true thirty years ago

As more than a century ago,

As it was thirty minutes to now:

Prayer carved the sable flowers, chorals 

Spun rose windows in the aisle, music

So silk long by arch and colonnade

That these lines trembled out and followed.

Body recalled the industrial 

Cathedral blackened and scaffolded

Even after seven centuries

Of planning and building and bombing,

Incompletion and restoration

Marking an eternity of change.

And body was dreaming in the sun,

Only daydreaming to the last breath

Played in the wheezing chords with pauses,

Longer and longer, that cliffhanger,

Der Abschied. The clear glass was windshield

Not high windows. The sky was over 

Desert mesas not smoking city,

The memory of the cathedral

In the poem, the chords, the pines, the snow.

Quality Time, Edge of the Knowable World, Utah, 19 December 2016

Yesterday, the body was reading in a pool of sunlight

In a glowing book, while listening attentively to the small

Birds peeping outside the mud-spotted window. This book I was

Reading was not the local library's copy of Billy Collins

Someone else brought home, each little lost insight

Wagging like the short tail of a perfectly obedient spaniel.

(He said it, bless his heart. I didn't!) This book was the same 

Treatise of rebel cosmology, caught up in time, I've quoted

So waggishly myself before: "The experienced qualities of qualia 

Correlate with changes of energy. Colors are a measure

Of energy, as are tones." The daughter interrupted the birds,

Wanting a snack to go with her "but it's educational!" Octonauts  

Cartoon. Change, thought body to body, experiencing various qualia,

Quite petulantly, is changes of energy, always, qualia too.

Then body pocketed the glowing book to go get daughter a snack.

When I looked back, it was next morning, a hard frost again 

Bricked the ground around the old, warped door, the garden gate.

Daughter had been up half the night with a head cold,

And the looming changes in energy made qualia feel afraid,

Teetering on the edge of the knowable world as the small birds

Burst from frozen bushes into sun, frantically renewing

The search for yesterday's seeds, a couple of juncos bouncing

Off bedroom windows' glaring hard reflections but not falling,

Not dropping to the ground stunned dead, not this time, 

Mercy amid the cruelty as always, caroming into bare blue.

Putting the Elves in Themselves, Winderland, 18 December 2016

The exhaustion of the body, that conglomerate
Composed of interdependent lives and lies, rules.
Within the body, lesser lives come and go continually.
Lies speak for them. Little lives support the lies in gratitude.
Lies are elves, elves are words and thoughts, ideas
And stories most of all. Even if body ever encountered
A story wasn't a lie, doubtful, I never knew a lie wasn't a story,
No matter how small. We nestled in the dark, cloudless morning
Before even any predawn glow, the soft light,
Like a thin shawl, just the latest waning moon
On the stones outside our window. We were awake,
Another poem, the lives in us, the elves in us,
The restless conglomerations hugging each other.
How many inner lives left or started overnight, the elves
Never said, being fairies always ready to alight like parasites
In another worshipful conglomerate somewhere else,
Where they could once again demand death before dishonor,
Actually being the slogans they pretended to present
On behalf of the others but being the others as well.
Their current whole body, this just passing, past morning,
However exhausted, still breathed and moved, stirred
Myself and my companions--good morning, good morning,
I love you, I love you, too--however tired themselves.

Cold Front, Zion, 17 December 2016

Poem in four characters. Above heaven, big winds.
Poem in three characters. Above canyons, storms.
Messieurs, it was an artificial world. Dodging the deer,
Hail, and lightning high up the canyon to catch sight
Of the waterfalls at dusk last night, body thought again
Of all the mice I'd set free only to survive such storms,
Of the poems when I'd imagined god as a mouse alone,
Body as a mouse, the odds against all or any one of us
Escaping intact. Hail battered the already well-dented car
And the lightning kept convincing me all was about to crash.
Body thought of Stevens' good and evil, reality and imagination,
And it was all one whirl of the flood pouring mud through the dark.
By midnight, wind scoured out the clouds, shook the frail gates,
Tossed body in dreams, body in and out of awareness, froze
What had fallen. The walls of the canyons slipped, just a bit.
Poem in four characters. Woke up this morning.
The good was evil's best invention, not the last. Woke up
This morning. Saw blue sky walking like a man.

Surprise Creek, Utah, 16 December 2016

Rare wet day in the desert at the mouse-tail end of fall,

Patti Smith on the radio explaining why she stumbled
From emotion singing "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall."
Flirting with the fatal ledge the way the betrothed
Might flirt with the beguiling stranger, beguiling
Because strange, unlike anyone life's betrothed
Has ever known or wanted to know, half hoping
To be rescued by that strangeness from what promised
To be a long-suffering prison of decaying attachment
To flesh, but lacking the madness, the courage to leap,
The body waited by the sudden creek in the dry wash,
Dangerous, to listen to the rush and wonder how
The future had managed to continually project regret
Backward, as if regret had belonged to the past. The body

Saw now how pondering any decision, playing out

Scenarios, however unrealistic, made the sad illusion
There were options and outcomes to choose, good or bad.
The future, that surplus of heads and arms and eyes, cowed
The past dreaming it had something mortal to do with whatever
Came next, the continual winnowing of monsters and doubles,
Imagination replaced by surprise. Bodies don't really like
Surprises, tumbles and falls--why life became a kind of canted
Prediction machine that wanted to get what it couldn't
Have long to itself to eternally extend. The creek's talk was not,
Then, the end of that song of flirtation, no surprise.

Balance, Winderland, 15 December 2016

The moon was a house in which no architect invested.
It tottered on the garden gate at five a.m. among
The strings of colored lights, then seemed to fall
When the small-town garbage truck rumbled up.
The clouds got in the way again. Another minor mercy,
Being awake in the house to see the houses of the night
Tumble and glow like little bank accounts, like faeries
On the shadow lawns of local, brief arrangements,
The planets, the planes, the winking stars, the moon,
The gates, the eaves, the decorated tents of trees.
When all are accidents, temporary, retrograde, unbalanced,
Then there are no mistakes, after all. I wobbled
Out of bed, barely capable biped, but I pounced.
And there I was, smiling again in the dim, behind
My cloudy veil, behind my thoughts, the sense
Of being something, glowing and implausible again.

Starlight, Southwest Utah, 14 December 2016

I read a parent who wrote that, in parenting, "I sometimes felt 

As if I were taking apart a ship and using the planks to build a ship 

For someone else," and I thought again of Shunryu Suzuki's aphorism,

"Life is like boarding a ship about to set sail and sink." I doubted 

The writer had Suzuki in mind, but I knew I had taken my own ship 

And built a ship for someone else, and now found myself without 

Further strategies, either for floating or sinking. Treading water, 

I wondered, what have I done? I had wanted to perish just at sunset. 

Instead, I gave my life a gloaming. A small child half adrift

In the boat of her own clutched my sleeve. The light wavered.

She could not rescue me. I could not rescue her. Together,

We let the sunset slide down, and there we were, both dreaming,

Still breathing, night rising all around, as night always has, 

Full of effectively powerless lights, our imagination's omens,

The reason my daughter named her boat, "Starlight, for wishes!"

Another morning was implied, and another, and another, if not

For me, then for my daughter, my daughter in her floating world.

But I had no strength, no supplies to survive. I had no supplies.

Retreating from the West, 13 December 2016

East Zion's white clouds let the moon slip through their fingers

As I drove toward them, home to the mystery never home.
East mountains' white clouds said continue moving, even
If it's evening, even if winter falls. I have yet to fail successfully,
But my whole body, whole sensorium ached to arch over
The swift plunge, the slow collapse, the humiliation pulling
On the crutches that have propelled me from chair to car to bed again.
I would need failure to overtake me before I crawled away again.
I smiled in the dim of the moon and the dashboard lights. What
Silliness, such hushed drama, not yet home to the home
Of nothing doing. It's silly to be sad, and my daughter says I'm silly.

Cat Gossip on the Way to School, 12 December 2016

One of the girls carpooling to grade school related to me

In detail the history of the pet and feral cats in her neighborhood,
While the other girls talked about cartoon characters in the back.
There were the kittens weaned too early, the outdoor cats consumed
By viruses, worms, or foxes. There were cats of poor toilet behaviors,
Several incestuous litters, and much uncertainty about paternity,
Plus enough orphans for some uncertain maternity as well,
Despite the many castrations, spayings, and frequent house arrests.
There were good cats and mean cats, cats that were sweet, pathetic, and scratched.
The girl was thorough. She named names. Cute, no? The human
Habit of gossip might seem absurd layered onto the ravenous habits
Of cats, as trapped in their wordless felinity as we in our languages, but
Names, morals, and confabulations are physical and ravenous, too.
Inevitable and unreal are all living and dying, once you're living in this world.

Of the Same Coin, Winderland, 11 December 2016

My thoughts have been like the betraying tail of the mouse
I found in the trap yesterday morning, lively and nervous,
With a tiny dead companion curled up in the far corner
Seemingly sleeping. When I took them out and shook
The quick and the dead, the dead tumbled out obligingly
While the quick wedged itself upside down in the door
Of the trap and would not budge. Only the tail dangled,
Inviting a brisk tug. I tugged. The mouse clung, smaller
Than my thumb, stubbornly trying to make itself smaller
Yet. I surrendered and left the whole trap, open to the air,
Lying there in the far grass, vowing this was the last mouse
I'd torment for sneaking around in my house. Never really was
My house anyway, none of them ever were. I should
Tumble out obligingly myself, if I could ever be done with should,
But I'm still clinging, curling up in my own waste, trying to reel in my tail.

Quail Creek, 10 December 2016

I ate my lunch, wrote my poem, finished a book I'd been reading.

I watched an apparently vacationing couple ride horses around

Through the red rocks and sagebrush, until they disappeared.

I saw a silent woman walking her large, black dog along the creek,

And I listened to the chatter of Themselves below the bridge.

The sixteenth and final track on the soundtrack album

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind dwindled and stopped.

"Dammit!" said Vespasian, "I think I'm becoming a god."

A suicidal procrastinator could survive a surprisingly long time.

. . .

Five the next morning, the neighbor's cat patrolled the holiday-lit garden gate,

And my daughter, who had arrived at that hour in the snow in the north

Six years earlier to the minute, wandered in to fetch birthday greetings,

Climb under the covers, and tell me she couldn't sleep. What can I do 

To reconcile the worlds without breaking the truce between them?

The End of Term, Vernon Worthen Park, 9 December 2016

Wonderland once was underground. "I'm going

To survive the last day of classes, just barely,"
Said Nancy Ross, LDS feminist and professor
Of Art History. "I've got four years, one month, and eleven
Days," growled Charles Cornwall, Academic Adviser.
"I'm thinking of my time left as my baccalaureate
In the art of retirement. A full four-year degree."
The pessimism was too much for the Associate Provost, checking
Her watch as she popped into the old Butchershop,
Well-coiffed and moving rapidly, despite recent brain surgery.
She wanted to discuss new things, the future of the university!
"Don't make me go back in there," she pleaded as she left.
Was it a goof that we all pretended busyness for mere nonsense
Or is nonsense quintessence of any busyness? You know.
It's all above ground, now. Chased to the park myself
For a few moments' pause, dodging the retired dog walkers
With their leashed shih tzus, poodles, mutts, and spaniels
Sniffing a reasonably cold morning under plane trees and palms,
Looking for a quiet hole to hide in, a magical escape, I thought
Maybe the White Rabbit, like Cold Mountain staring into the gorge,
Inviting any reader who wanted to join him in clouds,
Only wished to get away from the sunlit nonsense overhead,
To get home, to get well underground before he got caught.
"I'm going to survive the last day of classes," I thought,
"Just barely." But I was late. Late, late, late. Want to join me?

Pah Tempe Hot Springs, Permanently Closed, Utah, 8 December 2016

Nothing, one, and everything were the only whole numbers I recognized,

Everything, one, and nothing. Or everyone, one, and no one, the same.
I conceded it was possible, as I crossed the morning bridge
Over the "permanently closed" but enduringly sulfurous hot springs
Whose fumes like hounds escaped barred gates to chase commuter traffic,
With everyone young chattering in the back of my one car, that one
In fact contained both everyone and no one, all and nothing,
Which seemed a bit guru for my taste, especially with the stench of hell
Flaring my nostrils. In fact, I'm not sure I ever really had faith in one.
If there is a unity to all and none, it's in the relentless change
That exchanges the one for the other, the ever-braiding delta
Downstream from but beckoning, always beckoning me.
Delta functions as an adjective in equations, signaling
Change in the term that follows. Delta t is a variable, change over time.
Change was never over time, however. Change was in nothing
So that time's been in everything. Don't think of them
Too glibly as separate things, just as the fact of separating,
The fact of the way the world is, was, and becomes the world.
The way I am and the way the world is, as it were, were never
A particularly good fit, but I can say I lasted longer, partially intact, than I ever
Thought I would, if not so long as my father, who was somehow
An even poorer fit. Nonetheless, everything escaping has to let nothing
Back out again, I was thinking, the stench of the inaccessible healing waters falling
Behind, another day, perhaps, everything and nothing as one. Another day.

La Folia, Virgin River Gorge, Arizona, 7 December 2016

Seventy-five years ago an empire
Attacked a hegemonic republic.
All friends now. Swing your bagpipes round and round,
Dance your sackbuts, strum guitars. Twenty-four
Days ago, a fool, a puffing wind bag
Looked past the bole of an evergreen tree
On the rocks at the edge of the black ledge
And shrank back. Still breathes yet. Swing your bagpipes
Round and round, dance your sackbuts, strum guitars.

Honeydew, North Plaza, 6 December 2016

I was not caused by timeless law applied
To a timeless space of states. My story
Was a single evolution which can't
Be broken down into just laws and states
Alone. Here's where I was in the system,
Aphid dependent on bacteria,
True bug, hemipteran, sap sucker, small
Lamb in the fields of the ant colony,
Incapable of not secreting poems,
Incapable of escaping the ants,
Dependent on vigilant mandibles
To protect me from hungry ladybirds,
Helicopters hovering over me,
My keepers. Closed my eyes that I might feed.

Pending Heaven, Hurricane, Utah, 5 December 2016

The grey that gathered in the afternoon
Of denial, of rejecting phone calls
From well-calibrated machine strangers,
Was not fog, not something you'd say. It falls.
Attraction deformed Einstein's universe.
Patrolling light defined its prison walls,
And gravity became geometry,
But something about geometry crawls.
What could you have said, anyway, wasn't
Like the blarney any miscreant bawls--
Misquoted scripture, slang, faked high dudgeon,
Self-serving illogic? Pretty much all
You would and have written already on the air
That grey, black, blue, or white rose gravid with despair.

Each Year We Make Bets, Which One Day All Its Leaves Will Fall, Winderland Lane, 4 December 2016

So late in the lengthening year that even in this desert

Nearly all photosynthesis had quit, including poetry's

Equivalent, the praise within the lament, it went. O what

Made fatuous sunbeams toil to break earth's sleep

At all? They did not toil for thee. They struck, and the rest

Was always over with, not within, not without, rash profits

Skimmed off just before impending loss. I have studied

The many artifiscientific practices of prediction, anecdotal,

Magical, devotional, probabilistic, self-fulfilling, sly,

From a distance, mostly, being fascinated but incompetent

Apprentice to that sorcery. Reduction is stronger

Than truncation, wrote the contrarian cosmologist,

To which I would ignorantly add, truncation results

From reduction, slow, cyclical, or sudden, so that this year's lament

Peeled like petals, fell as today's stunned sun shower

Of wasted leaves to sprinkle this windless morning

In a dry yard in December, all dropping from the single tree stayed

Dark and handsome bronze to the last possible hour.

Lament lay in near perfect circle, a shuffled, layered, pleated skirt

Girdling its own asymmetrical roots with a lower halo 

Of fallen sky and sun machines, leaving only the praise tree, silent,

But smiling ridiculously in the direct light, much reduced,

Young green spent, gold profits spent, bronze losses spent, but silver

Trunk gleaming more brightly than ever, untruncated

Yet.

North Fork, 3 December 2016

Had a day when your impersonal world seemed

More personable than yourself? Wind blew hard

Through that wild beauty, the sky, and the creek 

Could be heard nonetheless, the small birds, even the light 

Could be heard to have said something nice. Nothing

Seemed to be bent on extinguishing anything singing,

And only my neurons insisted, kibitzing, sotto voce, 

When no one noticed, when I wasn't paying attention myself,

On pulling out reams and bolts of old grievances to fluff

From dusty trunks, to consider, to stage shapeless costume 

Dramas of swathed and cloaked memories mumming,

Debating imitation antique drawing room insults and victories

Until the whole thoughtless limbic, hormonal alert system,

Like a secondary-school false-alarm fire drill in the auditorium, 

Fired up, and I woke up with a snort to my own nonsense again,

Scolding my thoughts to open the window, to notice the wind,

The light wrapped around them with intimate consideration

For our infinite, infantile wish for consolation, the world

Briefly resting its head softly against us, commiserating.

At evening when the cold blew through the canyons

And the deer haunted the highways, dead or alive,

I gripped the wheel of my compact, battered vehicle, 

Half lyric, half shambles, joining my flat-throated tones

To the layers of murmuring, singing, and song,

To the hum of the engine, the thump of the wind,

The whoosh of the blood hammering hard at my ears,

The nightjar on the pine, the woodlark in the night,

All singing an old song of their own, once of mine,

Chorus scored for indifference, concern, and delight,

"There is no beginning or end, only the middle and nothing."

Roadside Hazard, Utah Border, 2 December 2016

I've always hoped knowing I hoped as people who know

Better hope, against hope, for the most irrational hope,
For undeserved blessings, spontaneous remissions, things
Of that sort, as the wicked and the lazy and the living hope,
As the deserving, the not here, the nowhere never have to hope again.
When I with my last hope am dashed, whatever world remains likely
May loathe my failure to confess I kept fate waiting at the door.
I do not hope to convince, then, when I'm not, but I'll hazard now:
I kept all well behind that door, well beyond the hour appointed,
And I saw my others joyful, all my candles at dark windows.

Memory Is a Metal Folding Chair, St. George, 1 December 2016

The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be

The name of the Lord, my parents used to say, usually
Ruefully, albeit mildly, resignedly, a theological shrug
Over some minor mishap, some unexpected disappointment.
Me, I was more intrigued by the sequence of the saying.
In our church was much testimony given, much witnessing
About times when, after the Lord, presumably, apparently,
Had taken away, the Lord definitely, absolutely returned
Ten fold, as that saying went. But no one ever witnessed
The phrase, the Lord taketh away, and the Lord giveth.
What were the reasons, I wondered. Rote: never change
A sacred saying. But there were bad puns we made, groaners
On famous Bible verses and biblical cognomens, all the time.
Rhythmic: it just feels weird to front the longer phrase.
But folks in our world had no discernible ear for prosody.
Four square, shout amen, then sit back in your folding chair.
I decided that it was actually, subtly, just orthodoxy. Reverse
The turn and it implies that something was there before the Lord
Came and took it away, that the Lord's subsequent
Gifts were substitutions, not the originals. Preserve the order,
However, the message is that all good comes from the Lord, so
He's entitled to take it back at his discretion, blessed be
His name. After that, I found myself back in my own folding chair
While another two-hour Sunday sermon droned on, until nudged
In the ribs by my embarrassed father, who wanted me to stop
Whispering to myself obsessively, the Lord taketh away,
And the Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away, and the Lord
Giveth, and the Lord taketh away, and the Lord giveth,
And the Lord taketh away. You would have thought I'd realized
Something about the way the universe works that day, the way
I clung to that monotonous tapestry frame, grimly stitching away.

Relief Society House, Santa Clara, Utah, 30 November 2016

Listening to Pharaoh Sanders' Karma between the items

On the day's agenda, stunned to still be part of a day, much less

One with an agenda, it occurred to me that the pure shivaree

Of noise in the middle of "The Creator Has a Master Plan"

Makes a more impressive article of artistic faith than the typical

Creative work asserting an orderly universe. The usual trick

Is to embody the credo in an art that is stately and classical.

But the challenge lies in believing there's plan in the mess

Our cosmos presents us, Voynich manuscript that it is,

By which, no, I don't mean deliberately fabricated

By some super anthropic intelligence, but wholly weird

And indecipherable, though apparently rife with meaning.

We're rife with meaning, and part of it, and willing

To suspend disbelief for the merest hint of symbolic relief,

But the thing itself, so appealing while it still could be whatever

We wish it to be--power, peace, and happiness for every dream,

Black magic, alchemy, eternal life, the truth about our ancestry--

It's actual measure not yet taken, not yet collapsed 

Into one dull particulate splatter of facts, might be a sham,

Nonsense masquerading as hermetic wisdom, nothing

Gussied up to look like something an emperor, any greedy

Hungry human, might crave, might like. Blow your horns

All at once. Blow your lungs out, Jim. Signal noise.

Starlit Bedroom, Utah, 29 November 2016

Stars don't fix our destinies, but they fix our perspective
A little. Consider the stars as poetry critics. Would they forgive
Those poems not written to be heard, not for declaiming,
Slamming, singing, accompaniment, or chanting? The poems
Composed by a mind in the dark for a mind in the dark
To read by lamplight, waking no one, not a living soul,
Not a living tongue? I stood at my window soon, like all views,
To be lost to me, me to it, at some hour just far enough past midnight
To be considered small. No one was listening. No one was asking. No one
Was bothering anyone outside of my skull full of ghosts and those lights,
Those stars that neither forgave nor criticized anything, anyone, never.

Three Ravens, Mohave County, Arizona, 28 November 2016

Were the world one Arthur, I'd been feeling

A bit of the Black Knight myself. Come back you coward.
I'll bite you to death. I should have thought
He really did deserve to be declared the winner
Not only for utter immunity to commonsense and pain, not to say
Agony, but for miraculously not bleeding to death, for sheer breathing,
Even shouting, in a state where even a zombie could only writhe.
A collection of delusional amputations, empty boasts, and resilient pride
Myself, I drove into the desert of lies to renew my combat
With the odds. A black and red confection lay in a heap
On the highway. Feathers separated themselves from fur, blood, and bone.
Three ravens rose up and fanned out in a spiraling triskele in front of me,
Leaving the stump of time behind, momentarily.

Two Fighter Jets, No Winter Maintenance Road, 27 November 2016

The road looped on itself but not so often as the creeks
Looped under it. Cold weather at last, at least on the mesas.
A body could think it might be a good, quiet time to go
Except that a body never thinks like that, not outside
Of the precincts of the prefrontal cortex, no. I would
Not have believed the body's mad love of staying alive
Had I not kept my balance, barely, on a ledge myself.
The body's pull, back and away from the fall, felt
So strong it was more as if I were being pushed backwards,
Despite the black gap in tumbled lava that beckoned me.
It felt like a magnet, north to my north, opposed me,
Like holding two magnets pushing each other off, hard
To overcome. So I didn't. So here I was, thinking again
About change, about the weather, about whether I was
In the present or only the past, a pleasure or a bother,
A well-meaning character of many faults or only a sad scoundrel,
Long ways from the langitinaz, days still getting shorter,
Breath shorter, resources shorter, mistake shadows longer,
Darkness longer. Can the infinite grow? How would we know?
Every few turns of the groaning old globe I confront another
Night that threatens some ominous Monday. I can't keep
Returning without any highly unlikely returns. Highly unlikely.
Two fighter jets from nowhere screamed through the slate
Skies over me and I slid back down the road to bed.

One Drone, Winderland, 26 November 2016

Backyard, holiday weekend, no reason,
Was thinking, I didn't make the world, the world
Made me. I have to live with it as long as I'll be, but
It doesn't have to live long with me, when
A small, curious robot appeared in the heavens,
Hovering like a half-tricky sweat bee over me.
Someone as hopelessly foolish as I am, no doubt,
No doubt wanted to use his new toy (somehow,
I assume it was a he) to put his nose over the old
Stone wall that shelters our small courtyard.
The instrument of invasion, playing according
To the rules of this planet, this atmosphere, this gravity,
Made it both more charming, hummingbird silly,
And also more threateningly, dragonfly predator, insane.
It scrutinized me. I scrutinized it. It left.
I thought I rather wished it had been autonomous
And not just another extension of the source
Of my own perplexities. I would have liked a conversation
With something of the world really, truly unrelated to me.

Found Poem, Inevitability, Utah, 25 November 2016

I sat in the high country with my quiet friends, the ones who talk
In print and pens. The inner light of the first snow fell
Around us as we psyched ourselves up for the jump into winter.
"How absurd to still have a body," Mr. Young observed,
"Or to hold in your own hands," noted someone older,
"The nothing for which there's no reward." "O soul,"
I quoted a third, "be changed to little water drops."
These were the sorts of drolleries we muttered as we grunted,
Breath steaming in the thin air, rolling up our snowmen
In defiance of the cliff. Every wise guy learns defiance isn't
Wisdom, but only the wisest carry on defying. Trust me, you must
Trust this to no one. "Spruce trees bury spruce trees," suggested
One of the toppled snowmen. Wish spruce trees buried me.

Lost Poem, Gooseberry Mesa, 24 November 2016

This is what came of the poem I completed and lost
Two days earlier near sunset beside the Virgin River.
Startled as I was when my phrases fluttered away,
I was a little bit grateful for at least one thing
To have destroyed itself before me, one passage
I witnessed emerge, composed, then saw go, gone for good.
And it gave me a title. I've always been thankful for a likable title,
And this was a title I liked, especially perched on the cliff.
The next day, closer to done, I sat in the sun
In my perilous courtyard under the Watchman
And watched my daughter and her friend play.
They had dressed themselves in yards of unused tulle
And raced around the lawn as fairy princesses
In veils and trains, tripping and flying, bouncing
In and out of the small bouncy house, bright and dark.
I could have sworn for a day this was a life I could live
As it was for a time, for a long time, changing only slowly.
I knew I was wrong. I knew what was gone. But I gloried
In the comfortable day anyway. While I was composing the words
They were already the past, a deep but dazzling darkness.
Slaepwerigne, then, I woke up on this, my fifty-fifth Thanksgiving Day
To the sight of three stars over the garden's west gate
And the left hand of my daughter tousling my hair. Papa,
I can't sleep anymore. Papa, wake up. I'm bored.
We spent a sunny morning cantilevering toy blocks
Into tottering, counterweighted towers under the bronze-leaved tree.
Afternoon would mean pulling ourselves together, penniless,
To ascend the mesa and feast with a pretend family of actual friends.
I stole an hour and used precious fuel to drive up Maintenance Road,
Then hid out in the early shadows under the towering thrones,
Thinking how wordless behaviors can lead to hundreds of poems.
I believe it was neither love nor duty kept the boy on the burning deck,
Although I prefer Bishop's allegory to McGuffey's fifty-fifth lesson.
A real boy was frightened and confused in all the noise
And didn't know how to leave, didn't know what to do, didn't want to go
Despite surely knowing he was doomed. But that's not the poem.
It was time to go up the long, unsealed road to the mesa, to be a man
Eating reflections of myself. Not so poetic, just dark so early
That the windows would be obsidian mirrors as we ate, I knew.
Still, there was some cliff glow left when we got there, and a rocking chair,
And company gathered inside, around all the food, out of the chill,
Dry air, trying hard to not talk politics, not entirely succeeding,
Young and old and a couple of dogs. I caught myself reflected
Eventually making the familiar mistake of small talk, opinions I wasn't sure I held,
Anecdotes, allusions, ideas, and leftover witticisms like covered dishes I offered
To justify my presence at the table. When did my lost, finished poem
Become this unfinished, garrulous, nearly narrative skein? Our host
Taught my daughter how to tap a paradiddle. The cranky old truck
Made it home down the dirt ledge road under starlight, everything bright so far,
And the town lit itself with holiday lights in the canyon at evening's end.

Sky, 23 November 2016

It glowed blue between me and the blinding sun.
I don't believe it cared I had nothing clever left to say.
Atmospheric layers of changes changing continually
Would have erased their own patterns eventually.
We own that, I suppose, the capacity for continual changing,
The incapacity to cease creating and erasing, including
Each other, including skies of blue, including you, including me,
Excluding nothing, magic, all our incompletions vanishing completely.

Window Seat in the Butchershop, St. George, Utah, 22 November 2016

I shut the door so I could wonder to myself
How the animals felt who were slaughtered here.
It's just an office. It has a window and a slightly tilted floor,
Hard to notice, thanks to carpeting, that used to let
The blood collect. People talk about repurposing
And innovation as if innovation ever needed a purpose
Or could be steered by the changelings it prepares
For dinner.  Writes the science writer,  "If there's one thing
That everyone agrees on it's that the time for metaphors
Is over and the time for mathematics is at hand." I imagined
The beast about to be made into cutlets saying this
To itself, or the butcher saying it to the beast. Either way. I jumped,
Startled, when in another room somewhere another door slammed.
"No mathematical object is a perfect match for nature."

Numbers Are Fairies, 62 Winderland Lane, 21 November 2016

If they come your way, if they favor you, if they pile up in drifts for you, be grateful,
Be ever so grateful. If they abandon you, you can't hold it against them.
They're numbers, dreams that have no moral; they don't exist for you
The way that wealth and other phenomena counted by them do. They aren't
Other than a cloud of evoked rules and outcomes, crazy gorgeous, refined,
More alien to your lumbering nature than any extraterrestrial that eats would be.
The universe filled with them has not become one whit heavier, lighter.
They are an invisible world perfectly parallel to everything of your own
And, if they should, mysteriously, favor you, everything that you will own.

Either Now or Tomorrow or the Day After That, Temple of Sinawava, 20 November 2016

I imagined Wile E. Coyote sitting cross-legged in the air, lotus position,
Over Angel's Landing. It rained a little on the hikers waiting
To get on the shuttle back to town. I was an outlaw in the canyon,
Forbidden vehicle, not a permit. I watched the rangers, stretched too thin,
Go by me without a glance. Someone had fallen somewhere, someone
Had stumbled in the Narrows. It was getting colder and darker,
Which is the way of change. The control panel of my vehicle displayed
All sorts of warning lights, but there's something to gliding along
Waiting for gravity, weakest of changers when near, longest of reach,
To decide your suspense is over. Don't look so surprised. Smile when you fall.

The Rotating Stage Burns Down, Zion Amphitheater, 19 November 2016

The whole complex sank toward silence, sank or slunk,
The microorganisms, the host animal, the ideas and other memes.
When do you know your centrifuge has finished spinning? When
You no longer care what happens once it stops, only that it stops?
And if you never reach that point, if you're still grabbing the calligraphy brush
To draw another empty circle, still struggling to apologize, to dictate,
Does it prolong you? Probably not. Life is a dress rehearsal
For the night the whole theater shuts down. This is one of the thoughts
Of the mind that must tear itself away from all the minds
So that it can return its props to all minds, then close the doors of reception
By setting them alight. The burning globe fell in on itself and became
Ashes indistinguishable from the ashes of hospital, palace, or church.

Nothing Is Monstrous and All Nature Is One, Confluence Park, 18 November 2016

A red hot-air balloon, omen of misfortune, floated
Up from the chill dawn suburbs by the freeway through St. George,
Like a bubble of blood in the haze. Why omen of misfortune?
I don't know. It has seemed that way to me, seemed that days
When I spy the red sphere drifting over the morning traffic lanes
Turn out less than well, not to say unhappy, for me. Do I think
There's any concerned angel trying to warn me away? Not likely.
Possibly no human has ever had supernatural allies
Although we all crave them, almost all bully and pretend.
Possibly this world of maya is entirely illusion and delusion,
But there is no more real world besides. It never ends.
At most, at best, it never was. Or maybe not. I am not
Such a monster as to be apart from nature. Any creek
In the desert is life on a thread. The threads' confluences
Connect in quiet ravines not far from the roaring highway
Under that balloon that may or may not mean anything.
It all depends on what people do, what humans have to say.
I went down later that afternoon, past the sign for "HOPE,"
And I waited by a confluence, and I listened, and I hoped.

E cosi esisti! Springdale, Utah, 17 November 2016

Four years ago, in Moab, I had a barber named Norm and a dentist
Named Norm Barber. No barber, no dentist, no Moab now,
Two perished from their lives and the last left in another life. I've lost
My idiotic wrestling match with the mute world that will not
Reward me for chancing, but I still need a haircut and a cleaning.
I need a fortuitous event of such low probability that it might
As well be called a miracle. Or a miracle. I could do
With a miracle or two. In bed, I read late Merwin for warmth and Montale
For cold comfort these last autumn nights, but, as Montale's countryman
And co-generationist, Quasimodo wrote, each waits alone
At earth's core, cored by a ray of light, and suddenly it's dark.

Settling Matters, Hurricane, Utah, 16 November 2016

A character once muttered to her self who was elderly,
Gallant, that "Anything can be settled for a few days at a time,
Though not for longer." I spent a Wednesday pretending I could
Settle, that I had longer, like a mouse in a kindly trap that confines him
With a bit of the treat left that tempted him in, before dawn,
Reasoning to himself that nothing is hurting or gnawing him yet
And wondering whether it would be worse to be caught,
Terrified and exposed, thrown out into unpromising somewhere
Where he would be likely to freeze, starve, or be torn to pieces,
Or to never be disturbed, left to slowly dehydrate to death,
Pinioned, like the mummified mouse we ourselves once found in the trap
In the laundry closet where we stored the damn thing, unbaited.
Unbaited but happy to climb into the trap anyway, that was me,
That had always been me. Wandering in small circles, thinking.
I kept mistaking death for dying and what comes after.
Life is dying and nothing is what comes after. Death is a myth
Of the dying, a dysfunction and a destruction of other beings mistakenly
Recursively applied. Death, applied by an awareness of dying to itself,
Is a kind of Cretan paradox. If you're there, you're not; if you're not there
Who's dead, then, anyway? Only others can be dead. I can't be.
I shuffled some papers and drove home to the far side of my confines.

Eis Hadou Katabasis, Virgin River, 15 November 2016

Orpheus knew either way he would fail.
He didn't know where Eurydice was,
Whether she waited above or below.
If he descended, he'd never return,
Although he might find reunion and peace.
He knew he couldn't bring her back with him,
That others would claim themselves to be him,
Take over his lyre, sing in first-person.
Only he was the true, first-person lyre.
Only he could take confabulation
Down to underworlds known for their silence,
And not even he'd bob back up again.
But if he hoped too long in the open,
Had she been lost, he'd lose both wife and world.

Of No Consequence, Lower Galoot, Utah, 14 November 2016

"Find out what a difference one decision can make,"
Begged the flyer from the Sotheby's realtor in the mailbox.
One way to find out is to consider the ultimate decision
Seriously and then to decide against taking it. No way
To know what the alternative would have been like
For everyone else, but anything and everything next for the taker
Amounts to differences made by that one decision, declining nothing,
Whether horrible or delicious. If the decision were preordained
Of course, that's of no consequence. Not that the inconsequential
Is entirely inconsequential, however. Everything and anything goes.
Goes, goes. Sit in the sun one more time or more. Wake up in the dark
One more time or more. Feel deeply ashamed or briefly triumphant.
Be an animal. Feel pangs and hungers one more time or more.
The decision will come back around again or get taken away.
There was that moment balanced on a crumbling slope in the twilight.
What stepped back and walked away then was a difference.

Beaver Moon, Utah, 13 November 2016

The moon was up all night last night. Tomorrow will be full.
On the seventy-fifth day of the fifty-fifth year,
The world came to rest against the wall of a broken skull.
I made my bed before dawn. My daughter appeared
And unmade the bed by romping in it. The frostless autumn moon
Had set. Failure is coextensive with success. Too much
Wisdom is a dangerous thing. Regret is a ghost that haunts all rooms,
Although rooms and ghosts feel none themselves as such.
A body already broken too many ways wrong needs to get gone.
I fixed breakfast for my daughter and something for her to draw on.
Contented, she drew a silver unicorn with a golden horn.

Apad in the Shade, Maintenance Road, Zion, 13 November 2016

Experienced all the misery which follows on a disregard
Of the first conditions of domestic economy. Broke,
Chased the end of a day up through Zion Canyon,
Past where cars are allowed to go, past the cut stone
Rangers' houses, over the faintest permanent creek,
Headed for a place to watch the moon and try the dharma
Of one with a back against a wall big enough to ensure gravity wins,
Not to be selfish, not to be sanguine, not to be terrified. Lines
Snaked in and out of canyon and tunnel, even in November, meaning
Every dragon sunders lines of sense to reconnect chthonic facts:
Can't supply the king any more cheese. Time to maybe become Gopala.
Morte, tu mi darai fama e riposo. There was a trick of light sometimes
At the back of the thought that glowed from certain angles, gold.
Calling this cave of thought the lair of a dragon, people became afraid.
Someone said, however, enlightenment could take it on, convert the dragon.
Now people come to worship the same occasional glow that is believed
Became the more comforting shadow of an enlightenment. But shadows,
However enlightening, in my cave or no, I won't convert once I'm undone.

Terafim and Tuphos, Winderland Lane, 12 November 2016

Sleep wandered from my eyes at 3am. Household gods and humbug
Pranced around the darkened room as the moon set. Moonshine
Was a key word in the kids' book I had read to my daughter before bed,
Meaning flummabibble, bad and good, and ultimately the name of a gerbil
Standing in for a nonexistent baby kangaroo on an ill boy's pillow. Moonshine,
And then the real deal when the stars signal how far apart they really are,
Infernos in their thousands too weak by now to throw shadows. The real
Point is that these guardians and fairies and demons of dreams resist
Identification. We give them stories and rules and figurines.
We give them greetings and superstitions. We make small of them,
Our terafim, and are baffled when, like Rumpelstiltskin, they lay claim
To our flesh in return. We make little monsters of them who make us
Little monsters to ourselves. We owe them, and we should rest when we can
Accept any blessing wrestled from them, then let them go. Let us go.

Penultimate Reflections in a Dark Bed Before Dawn, 11 November 2016

Dreams woke me up from nonexistence, as they always do,
By announcing themselves as dreams or by announcing themselves
As the world. My self was pulled together again, a sense
Of continuity, as if nothing had happened since I went to sleep
When in fact nothing had. The only reason to be sentimental
About last days alive, last days of any experience, is the mythic
Sense we will be wanting to review those last things and maybe
Do them again once we can't. This rarely is the case, even living.
How many last times have you had you've never once revisited
Or so much as identified later in mind? And the real last day,
Whenever it is, is never to be revisited, never lasts.

The Composition, Utah, 10 November 2016

Once I began to arrange phrases composed of what occurred to me,
Whether in person and recently or as earlier phrases haunting me,
There was never much doubt about being erased, but ok.
I leaned into the sand and wrote quickly but as clearly as I could,
With proper punctuation to keep from being mistaken when I didn't want to be:
Plenitude and loss alike are only for the living.
Lacking hunger and awareness, catastrophe's a part
Of the scenery that never sees itself. I would like
To surrender, gracefully, to the scenery, but
I'm so hungry to keep seeing.

Katabatic Boukadora, Zion Canyon, 9 November 2016

"Nature uses number to overwhelm destruction," wrote Aristotle of fish eggs.
"Similarity arises from neglect of information," opined Lee Smolin of time,
And I found someone in that infinitely divisible moment for once to agree with.
It was a toss-up, for the next, whether there were anything else to hope
For from the series of divisions that sum forever over the bumps of unreason,
Given that the given distributions guarantee both extreme outliers and their rarity.
Don't bet on rarity is the commonsense admonition, but I never wanted
Anything other than winning a bet on the nearly impossible improbable.
Otherwise, what was the point of sitting on a donated bench in the sand
Eroding behind a sandstone ruin, listening to the remaining songbirds
Of autumn call from bush to bush above road roar in declining light?
The wind blew down from the canyons, pushing under eaves and sills,
Slightly changing the meaning of sanctuary, announcing winter coming
Into each, evening and morning. Were the first and last day.

To the Right of the White Election, Desert Highway, Utah, 8 November 2016

Love without talk, desires, or lies, mute my kisses, mute my sighs.
Why should we accept that consequences have causes
Can only kill us? Faith, finally, is only the refusal
To take the truth at face value. Decades ago, I cracked and shed
The carapace of particular beliefs that jacketed my childhood,
But faith, foolish faith, has been trickier to leave.
I want to laugh at the weirdly wonderful ways this world uses
To be cruel. I want to scoff, hope, disbelieve, not take seriously
The threats that reality levels at me, itself, and everything.
Silly Cosmos! You can't possibly be so dark. That's no way to be.
On an improbably fine morning bent on destroying the foolish
Things I had done in defiance of any good sense other than the sweet
Reluctance to accept what I'd always known to have to be, I refused
Again to abandon my persistent, solemn faith. I refused to concede.

The Road Between Nevers, Utah, 7 November 2016

I'm inordinately fond of greeting inanimate objects,
Plants, and nonhuman animals. I suspect
It's as close to religion as I'll ever get, and I'm about
As close to being among those greeted as I'll ever get
As an I. Once you're among them, you can't
Respond, not as a being responding. Oh maybe
The ponies, sure. Perhaps even the plants have a voice.
But they're intermediate anyway, not all the way home.
To be home is to be welcomed despite nonexistence
As a self. I'm fond of greeting anything close to home.

Kolob Terrace, Utah, 6 November 2016

Resting on a lichen-colonized hunk of basalt on a steeply bouldered slope
Peering west toward the laccoliths once again, the common complaint
That we can't time travel at will seemed a bit churlish to me.
That we travel at all, we time travel, and here my body and its inhabitants,
Its pronomial and hand-me-down memories, seemed to be, returned
As well as magically to a cliff I'd hadn't glimpsed in oh, say, ten or so weeks.
That we come into being, that we must cease to be, it was all time travel to me.
The sunlight slowly burned my skin, transforming the balanced suite of me.
The gambel oaks had shed their leaves. Pines and prickly pear
Danced dull green pavanes less obviously. A fly inspected my recently arrived
But amazingly ancient feet. A great collection of crumbling-becoming
Time machines lay heaped to the horizon, some of them me and some everything.

Syntithenai, Rockville, UT, 5 November 2016

All the ducks will have to die, I thought to my I, listening
To them make a ruckus on a pre-dawn pond nearby. Also,
I wondered if there's any chance at all that that's the test,
If some other version of a person, outside all this life
And death world, opted to volunteer to see how long
Before the punishing terms of this existence made it crack.
How much evidence of being stuck in a situation in which
Every being is stuck, however pathetically, perhaps comically,
Quack, having to die would such a being have to accept
Before surrendering? And is every being here, sweet morning light,
Under exactly this same, gethsemantic stress? The sun rose, bright.

Two Places I'll Have Never Been, 4 November 2016

Blind Willie Johnson wanted someone to tell him, "Just what is the soul of a man?"
How did he know there was a message, even when we didn't understand
The meaning? I sat by the side of the highway near the ruins. Nothing doing.
I walked up a bit of the Coal Pits Wash. Sweet in-between hour, not a soul.
Soulless. I visited Mama Earth Park and perched beneath old cottonwoods
Shedding this year's last left leaves into the year-round creek. Peaceful.
Again, not a soul. Very nice. And then I remembered me. Someone else
Arriving to find me already seated, reading, writing, and breathing
Could be forgiven for also finding the moment in the low-edged daylight
Soulful, or at least occupied. Preoccupied. But that's not the way it was
And not the way it will be, once my long-gone actual soul comes back for me.
At either end, when I could not have had and shan't have opportunity to be,
My soul is possession of nothing itself and there has been, will have, never be.

Long Dragon, Utah, 3 November 2016

A day said to itself, I am an I, I am a day, I shall consider the day:
To my left a continuous line of scalloped, reddish sandstone ridges
Proceeded in a ring that extended under the highway to my right
And did not end until well past the morning vicinity I tend to call home.
I imagined, in my arch and serene blue self with all the time in the world,
Oblivious to the clouds skirting my horizon and nodding like lambs politely,
I could recognize the entire edge of eroding earth below me as the curled tail
Of a dragon I'd long since conquered, although it had no more head nor torso.
So I straddled it a while, confident but a little blue above my vanquished world,
Like a bird, puzzled, still hungry after getting only the lizard's detachable tail,
Until I began to slip and fall, embarrassed, into the west, as I saw it, I guess.

Gnotobiosis, Dry Fishbowl, Adams House, 2 November 2016

"If you're upset, write a poem," wrote the prosaic essayist, clearly
A little bit upset about something, perhaps by the lack of poems
Being written. I knew what I knew, said the goldfish. I drove around
Dry ground all day, all afternoon, searching for the combination
Of recent and near, old and removed, that would turn into lines
The way that iron filings and certain microorganisms know to do.
I wanted the right name for it. I was not so upset, less than a week before
The big American presidential election set to transform the world,
Big deal, whether one believes in the last gasping piscine vote, or no.

The Enchanted Forest, 1 November 2016

In my cruel thoughts where I find death, nel fero pensier 

Dove io trovo morte, it didn't work. The idea was to escape,

Not to hang around hoping for a handout. I carry the forest

With me that the forest has always carried within it. So I'm here,

When I thought I'd be nowhere. Now what can I do? Slip

Into your enchanted forest before you know I've entered you.

Here I am, you think to yourself, but you're already prone

To thinking you're me, lying prone at the bottom of the ravine

Thinking it didn't work, in the words of an Italian dead

Seven centuries before me now slipped into me. He he. What is this

Bird whose wings cut out those stars the branches let me see?

Devendra Cloth, Zion, Hurricane, 31 October 2016

Dreamed terror of a rough piece of cloth that seemed
To be moving around my head in the dark. Was it in my head or
Outside my head? Was it being dragged along over the bed,
Someone dragging it, or was it dragging itself through my skull?
Its name was devendra cloth, that I knew, horrible, but that was all.
The emotions we feel in our dreams are too strong for the things we dream.
I think the things we dream produce no emotions themselves at all.
The gusts of emotion coursing down through the canyons' deep sleep
Stir up our dreams, whirling detached, scattered memories around
The way winds whip up piles of fallen leaves off the ground.
We wouldn't say leaves created the wind. We wouldn't snatch at them to read.

The World Goes On Beginning, Zion, 30 October 2016

God made me, having nothing more to do, and proved
There was nothing he could not make, if I were a thing he could.
Knowing that much, I had lived my waking life accordingly:
I had tracked down, so far as was possible for me, relations
Between the manifold aspects of my experience. I had
Described my universe as it was becoming, including,
So far as my shame and selfish self-regard allowed,
Its little sordid bits. I had not lied about lying was my proudest lie.
To the extent I had been honest I was ready to die.
In all this, I was accurate. Distressingly. That's why.

Time Was When Hermitage, Zion, 29 October 2016

My "resistance to systems (i.e. genre)" had fled into the "scare quotes

Around the blurb thought might dull their prismatic luminescence,

Their proof of parataxis's poiesis." I didn't write that, of course.

I sat in a pine chair carved with a chainsaw to look like it held the sun

And read through the dreams of Ives and her hermit, Nancy.

We can't all be the final girl, can't all be brave, can't all be cited or lauded

For choosing to publish our self-documented isolation, but we can

Ask as well, "Is it possible we somehow die for a time, a year,

A month, a day, without realizing this, then awake to find ourselves,

Which is to say 'someone,' present again, attentive, expectant, apologetic 

Even?" We can spend a final weekend, perhaps before or after that possibility,

With a daughter home sick watching Bambi and other lonely fare

And consider ourselves hermit, or what a hermit is today. Yesterday,

Shortly before I was born, Beth Gleick wrote Time Is When.

By the time I was in my mid-fifties, her sly son had quoted her,

Calling her a children's book. That's all I have time to report for now.

Right It Like Disaster, Adams House, Utah, 28 October 2016

It cheered him up to learn that swifts stayed
Most of their lives, ten months at a time, in the air.
He didn't have enough love to write fifteen drafts of losses
Suspended in eye-blue air, trying to raise art from despair.
His life had been more of a rusted canoe wobbling on pond chop
Than a sculpted arabesque of cloud-high devotion landing only to nest.
Nevertheless, he savored the notion of flight unsupported
By regular rest, given how only the air itself had given him
Much understanding or hope of understanding things.
The ideas he'd met had rarely been from bodies when he met them.
Were it not for books, engines, machines, devices with tuners, with screens,
He might have never gotten to know much of anyone or anything.
Now, he thought, "if I haven't seen as much, touched as much,
Been told by anyone elevated how well I elevated them--
If I've had less to lose on the one hand for having had to need a hand
Now and then, then, on the other hand, I could still dream upwards and sink
Down toward blank heaven's reflections with the best of them."
He knew it made no sense to think like this, but what sort of effort-full thing
Hangs suspended, spinning and sleeping and thinking while rowing its wings?
Apparently a small and selfishly falling, difficult-to-notice thing.
As he neared a stone home on the shore, no one home except air,
He could feel himself sinking and lurched, tipping over and over again.

Naal, Near Virgin, Utah, 27 October 2016

Reading a translation of a fifteen-hundred year old monk's
Grandly pious and politically shrewd account of wandering, I saw
There are gods of the mountains in the mind that imagines.
There are neither gods nor mountains outside of imagination,
Nor imagination outside of any mind at all, although imagination,
Like its gods and mountains, also has no need of any one mind at all.
These were the sorts of thoughts imagination provided a mind
It inhabited that happened to know, waiting for the local shadows
Of the mountains and their gods to finally fall, these rivulets of sand
Between exposed roots of the half-dead cottonwood trees were called
By some forms of thinking a dry wash, with water somewhere below,
By some a wadi, and by others, in other scriptures, a naal.
And the good of all this translating, reading, and imagining was what
In a world where the universe kept nonexistence to itself,
Where water fell a killer flood of tomorrow's empty wash,
So similar to another imagination as to seem unchanged,
When water came with sand and logs and tumbled
Stones when water fell at all.

Predawn Dream, 62 Winderland Lane, 26 October 2016

So long as anything's happening, there's always more,
And only so long as anything's happening is there anything at all.
The most miraculous act of faith of any beast
Is the swooning into sleep, inviting nothing in
For a temporary visit at the risk that nothing will have ever been
And nothing forever again. Sometimes I believe
Dreams exist to express the need of the beast
To reassure itself it's only sleeping
And the universe has yet to cease.

Mnesikakia, Daimonion, Zion, 25 October 2016

When I should have been picking my spot and surrendering

Payment of the whole world to the whole world, instead

I hibernated at home in bed, refusing to take responsibility 

For any sort of truth at all, whether it was the memory of old crimes,

The inner communion with the complex parasitical divinity, my demon,

Or the language that makes it certain that the math corresponds:

Beyond the event horizon the cosmos looks gorgeous, and I

Like any I, like the I itself, which had a first instance as the corruption 

Of something else and will have a last instance just as something else 

Corrupts it in turn, can no more escape the grim destiny of the singularity 

I can no more avoid than I can avoid tomorrow, which can only 

Avoid me by eliminating me and everything with me, even tomorrow, even I.

The Harrowing of Springdale, Day Three, 24 October 2016

Practice room ghosts haunted my more musical friends as they talked
About why they stopped performing, one jazz piano, one classical violin,
Over fine dark beers in our courtyard the other evening, fall fine as spring.
Why does anyone stop? One knows that the ghosts aren't listening,
But one can't help listening to the ghosts. Get rid of them, but
Know that gets rid of everything else as well. Bad Iuck. The ghosts
Were all we ever were and ever had to hear. There is no word in the language
For end-of-awareness sadness, but the spirit picks up the first sound
Of its approach. There's so much to awareness, so little ability to consider it.
The soul never ran away. The soul never returned. The soul took the world away,
Strange marriage, given the yearning for not-world that had to define the soul.
It would have been a fine thing for the world if everyone were entitled to be lucky.

The Harrowing of Springdale, Day Two, 23 October 2016

I do love that Aelfric termed it a harrowing, as if it were
A bit of guerrilla warfare, a quick strike across enemy lines,
Harassment, a predatory raid, not a cautious visit
Like Odysseus made, not begging like Gilgamesh,
Not exploring. Nothing touristy about it, nothing settled either:
Not an actual victory parade, certainly no obliteration,
A surprise attack and then an equally quick run back.
Here I am again, alive, sort of, hanging around my own grave.
Although, if I'm doing any harrowing myself, it's in reverse.
I hide out among the living and make my small sallies such as this.
I show up from the end of the dreams and the dreams within those dreams,
Having nothing much to say to the late grasshoppers and butterflies
Other than surprise. But I am not surprising. I grab a bit of grubby fun,
While the bees hum and the body breathes and everyone
Else is out getting on with actual lives, living while I hover
And listen for the praying mantis waiting, on my window, for dinner,
For no one knows the answers anymore and the dark is here,
Or here soon enough, and one more day away from hell is done.

The Harrowing of Springdale, Day One, 22 October 2016

After work and before home, I drove a ways up the Kolob Terrace Road
And pulled out on a scrubby basalt ledge to hobble around and glance
Over the edge, here and there. It was neither so sheer nor so fearsome
As I had hoped, although at points the slopes displayed sprawled quantities
Of broken metal trash, rusted to dried blood and brown lace, whole
Machines and chunks of machines old enough to indicate there was a time
When folks hurled busted trucks and farm equipment over the shoulder
For fun. But it didn't look like the kind of place for a clean explosion.
Too bad. The sky was clear and the traffic was light, and if the solipsist
Or narcissistic nihilist or whatever the hell he was was too cowardly
To risk a prolonged acquaintance with a suite of fresh fractures at once,
At least he could have convinced himself of some romance in the fall
Were it not for all that elderly garbage oxidizing ever so slowly below.
I winked at him and hoped never to make his honest acquaintance,
Then got back in my trembling car to drive home. When the sun set,
The stars leaned close, and some lost their hold and fell.

Other and Other Waters Flow, Zion, 21 October 2016

While the others ate their dinner and discussed the day, one went
Out to a chair on the lawn after dark, under a comical, shadowy tree
And he felt a breeze, and he watched the headlights of the cars on the top leaves
As they parked in the restaurant lots down the streets, and the stars
Came out like civil servants in the darkened courtyard of a deposed emperor
To greet him, although he was no more than the thought of them, and he thought:
It's almost a family tradition, among my daughter's female ancestry,
To grow up without a father in the house. Her mother's father was gone before
Her mother turned two, and her mother's mother's father was killed
In a prop-engine plane crash as an Alaskan bush pilot
When his daughter was six. Her mother's mother's mother's father perished of MS
When she was still a child. My mother's father died of fever at age forty-four,
In the pre-antibiotic age, nineteen-twenty-seven, before she was born.
My mother was named after him. My daughter didn't have to be named after me.
But who knows what world we're in. The river is the same I'm standing in. I am not.

Thanatography at Dawn, Zion, 20 October 2016

Maybe our certain foreknowledge of our own demise is the reason
All our stories come to ends even though the universe seems bent
On relentless continuity. Nobody gets to die together in the true apocalypse,
To judge from how everything began, begins from the process of fresh endings,
And personal departures, much as personal arrivals, even when they look abrupt
From the outside, are forever very much in medias res from the inside. I thought,
What if things are exactly as they seem? Everything else goes on
After each body collapses, each personality vanishes, each
Memory evaporates. Memory goes nowhere, while new memories form
Among the living who will collapse in their time, memories gone from them.
There was never any other way the cosmos was except as we've found it,
Despite our gift for imagining it otherwise, which is part of it:
Nothing ventured, everything lost; everything ventured, everything lost.
Loss is nothing. It happens to have happened this sort of way. Is is what was.
If things are exactly as they seem, there will be someone left to read this, to be
Rightly angry with me. And if things are not exactly as they seem, then it seems
There's no clue how things really are, nor whether things were ever anyone, at all.

Retronyms, Joshua Tree Preserve, Utah, 19 October 2016

Ain Ghazal farmers kept defleshed, decorated skulls in their homes
Along with big-eyed figurines, perhaps of gods or other ancestors.
The decapitated skeletons went under the floor. So much for memory.
Ten thousand years will do that, consume the beliefs held by buried believers.
Prepare then, to submit, evade, or resist. The emperor stood on his head,
Reversed, the face of an analog watch strapped to his anachronistic wrist.
He sank across the border, down through the gorge, away from town,
Away from farms and ranches, seeking out his bare rock, his mountaintop
From which to assert his rule was not yet over. He still meant something.
He still had the trick, the power of seeming to mean. He sat under Mars,
During the day, invisible to war as war was invisible to him, and he waited
For a native human American bearing a stone weapon to come
And either set him straight, in all unlikelihood, as if the world knew him,
Or to encourage and accept his analog sacrifice of the universe entire.

Longhorns, Rockville, Utah, 18 October 2016

In the beginning, the day had low entropy.
We organized ourselves and left the house with a docket
Of detailed schedules for a typically busy Tuesday.
School, work, shopping, doctor: the ecology of the middle class
For which we, for now, maintain sufficient camouflage.
We saw the usual tour of domesticates en route to St. George,
The cows, ponies, donkeys, ostriches in their roadside fields and pens,
Although we missed the longhorns usually grazing outside Rockville.
By midafternoon, the doctor had been missed, the shopping had cost double
What we'd budgeted or, at least, anticipated. Work was boring
When it was work and was bullshitting in an office when it wasn't.
Nothing needing doing can't be done sloppily. It's amazing
How the final days of Pompeii were like the other days of Pompeii, right?
I looked for the longhorns again on the road home and imagined
The sight of them was an omen of unlikely good fortune.

Ten of Cups, Hell's Backbone, Utah, 17 October 2016

We started the day with checkers and toasted marshmallows by the camp fire.
You got a problem with that as a piece of poesie? A little family happiness?
At the Coombs archaeological site, where a Kayenta-style small pueblo
Shared living space with Fremont-style pithouses, eight centuries ago
For two or three generations before all the little rooms were abandoned,
We walked in and out, stared at hearths and artifacts, the remaining walls
That reminded me of the little stone honeycombs open to the sky at Skara Brae,
Occupied some five thousand years earlier and half a globe away.
What were the lives of those families like? What were their happinesses?
How did they end? What did they care about most at the end?
Driving over Hell's Backbone, the sheer cliffs crumbling down
And away from both soft shoulders simultaneously, I felt the weight
Of the ever-shifting world on my own slumped shoulders
And asked my happy child in the back seat which side would be
Scarier to fling her door open toward. She picked the farther side
And then we both laughed. Later we ate pizza at Backerei Forscher
On the route home and teased each other about how stinky we were
From a weekend in the wilderness, under the nearly now
Full moon, glow sequined by only the brightest of yesteryear stars.

The Gulch, Burr Trail, 16 October 2016

The sea battle had not happened yet, but unlike Aristotle
I had been raised in a universe of probabilities, comfortable
With being precisely uncertain about what could happen next.
I knew what could, should and would happen next. I'd had
A ripping nightmare in the windy, moonlit tent about it,
But it hadn't happened yet, not yet, not yet, not yet. Soon,
Surely, but not yet. Sand blew into my mouth as we played
All afternoon in the canyon, leaves whipped up like flocks of goldfinches
Darting about the heavy-lidded red sandstone walls.  A Monument
Ranger, sporting a utility belt worthy of the Batman, taser, pistol,
Flashlight, work knife, pulled in to make sure I had no thought
Of starting a fire in the hearth whose ashes swirled about our feet,
Then meandered onto mortality, led by the muse of natural beauty:
"You're here at the best time of year, though. Sometimes
I almost drive off the cliff road myself because it's so beautiful
In here, with the colors and all. Surprisingly few people do
Go off the road, though, and most of them have survived. That's the way
Life is, isn't it? Somebody drives off a rock wall and surprises
You by being alive, while some other guy rolls his truck
In two inches of water in a ditch and drowns. Well,
Enjoy your day! Good to see you using your public lands!"

The Sea Battle of Tomorrow, Burr Trail, 15 October 2016

Heading south from Boulder, the tents and campervans scattered
In sandy pockets of wash, scrub, and rolling juniper-piñon,
It was fine autumn day but windy, the cottonwood leaves flying
Where the cottonwoods had gathered by the creeks,
Like the rabbit brush, jocund gold just passing peak, hints of gray.
Hunter moon rose with a light so bright in the free desert
Lacking any electric lights that it threw sharp shadows,
Revealed life lines on palms, and woke my daughter in the tent
At two a.m., "Papa it's almost sunrise. Look at the light
On the clouds!" I was terrified, waiting for the wind to say
When it would carry me away, but I did, and I saw that it was nothing
Like an actual morning, but it was hauntingly beautiful, she was right.
By tomorrow, either the sea battle Aristotle parsed and worried about
Will have been fought and lost, or it won't, or there was
Never no sea around here, no here neither, nor battles.

Mild Moonrise, Zion, 14 October 2016

It was a day like a silent film star bouncing
Off an awning, momentarily upward bound.
My daughter and I stole cherry tomatoes
From the community garden, pretending to be
Good witch and wizard making potions out of pollen
At the picnic table. That kind of a day.
The warmth was warm, the breezes gentle,
The piles of dishes that needed washing got washed,
The camping trip that needed packing got packed.
The paycheck checked; the haircut cut.
Even the late afternoon playdate played out
Into evening, next town over. When it ended,
We came home and watered the lawn until the moon
Appeared to clear the cliffs again, as if it were rising
Not spinning around and around, slowly slowing down.

The Only Hope Is to Be the Twilight, Zion, 13 October 2016

Even the wind has a sort of lifespan. The first and final breezes disappear
Together. No matter when we forget, when we forget,
What we forgot is gone. Toward the evening of a gone world,
The light of its last autumn found and suffused the red rock
Of Zion. The grandeur of the weather is a glorious shawl
Around the shoulders of a petty human being, grieving
And feeling sorry for himself and all his trifling ways.
That's what I was thinking as I sat in a spare chair
At evening while the tourist traffic ebbed and flowed
Around me, but what I said, to a random neighbor
Who spotted me, was, laughing, "I'm fine! Beautiful evening!
The katabatic winds should be blowing down soon."

Halkyonides Hemerai, Confluence Park, LaVerkin, 12 October 2016

In the world under the moon, the shadows stretched and leapt.
Soon everything coasting the extenuating waves would be
So much quieter. For that quiet to happen, other things had to go.
In the meantime, there was a certain quiet in anticipating
The greater quiet to come. A lizard ran along a split rail fence.
Gnats danced in the sun, and the creek, nearly dry, continued
To run. I waited for the green flash of a future bird nestled
Into more gentle rivulets, but imagination must know when it goes
Looking for anything so elegant it's only imagination it finds.
No day ever waveless, no natural history held up
An annunciation of a season of fullness that ever held still.
The cottonwoods would yellow and fall until the creek filled, and then
Something else would waver through the air where leaves had been.