Beaver Dam, Arizona, 31 August 2016

I'd always found those tattered palm trees
Slightly comforting in that ugly little place
With its faded lottery signs, battered antique pickups,
And dark, musty bar by the brown-edged golf course
Made intermittent green by irrigation.

Between Joshua trees and the Virgin,
One could imagine a hermitage would make more sense,
Rather than that effort at monetized fun in the sun,
But even this muggy morning, when it was too hot
For anyone to want to escape there to recreate
And only one tall, muscular young man with a shaved head,
Wearing basketball shorts, a tank-tee, and track shoes,
Was at the counter, laying out hundreds in twenties
To buy folded wads of scratch-offs that he carried out
In both fists, stumbling over a poster board for tequila,
I had a good feeling and bought a small packet
Of lemon wafers for the drive back to work
Through the gorge on my birthday.

Office Window, St. George, 30 August 2016

One improbably tall, whimsical, wizard-hat shaped cedar tree
Tilted its top across the parking lot from the end
Of a world that kept filling its baskets with notices
That bark beetles and blight were felling its cousins
All over California, and the fires so severe
The forests would never come back,
Only scrubland, only shrubs. In my mind's eye
I pictured Anatolia and goats and then
The lost cedars of Ilyanka and Humbaba,
And I felt morose and nostalgic for a home
Made up of dead, dry twigs of human history,
Pressed paper, burnt bricks. Never been.

10^120/10^88=10^32,
Equals our total allotment of entropy
To create between the birth of the universe
And the utter indifference of its death.
Recent calculations suggest we've used
Ten to the tenth earth-year-based units
To get to where we are doing these tricks,
And these tricks further suggest it will take
Until ten to the fortieth of those units
To exhaust every distinction left. So,
We're good. I guess.

Super Sven Swallow, 29 August 2016

He's an imaginary bird I spotted
As I turned my heading crossing LaVerkn Creek
And saw the thin metal lettering of a sign
I'd never noticed before, not on any
Previous commutes, which spelled:"HOPE."
I have no idea whether the sign was meant
To refer to the nearby subdivision,
Someone's individual property,
Or a general hortatory principle,
But in spotting the happy bird I decided
For myself it must be the latter.
Later, I sat in the hot shadows of my courtyard
Watching the real sparrows and finches, house and gold,
And I said to myself, why not?
Until imagination itself is taken from me
Or, more exactly, me from imagination,
Why not? I watched the clouds over the cliffs
Carrying brave bird messages everywhere.
Actual hours I watched them.

West Zion Pullout, 28 August 2016

Whoever chooses the placement
Of roadside picnic tables and pullouts
Lives in a world of decisions I don't understand.
Wherever the views are most breathtaking
Or the bend in the ponderosas most peaceful
There is no shoulder to lean on, nothing
But sudden drops that make me slow down 

And catch my breath. But where the view's obscured
And there's maybe an idle backhoe,
Where the weary traveler who sits must watch
Each touring motorbike pass within arm's reach,
Where tattered surveyor flags dot the bald pine straw
Like the remnants of some Borgesian map,
There waits the picnic table and the place to park.

I suspect some trick of the crossroads lurks.
What better trick than to keep the crossroads disguised?
It looks like there's nothing happening here,
Nothing but a pause in the homeliest part of the park,
This happenstance pocket along
The line of the wandering road, approved for a pause.

The edges elsewhere make for more obvious temptations,
A plunge to the floor of the canyon
From this or that cliff's pouting, overhung basalt lip.
There are intersections and trailheads everywhere
Except for here, this whatever-the-hell
Of a place to wait for a messenger
Who'll never appear to bargain decided fate.

I can hear grasshopper wings,
When there are no motors bypassing me.
I can hear flies buzz and little birds quarreling,
The wind making its way through the range.
I can feel the hot sun on my sagging back
And taste the reflexive panic in my mouth
Each time I think of those sheer edges that tempt me

To fly down to death in an instantaneous

Agony of adrenaline and regret
And instantaneous blackout of permanent forget.

I don't need a god to tell me what I am,
Even if I depend on anonymous park rangers
To tell me where I'm allowed to relax.
I'm the true accident where intentions overlap;
I'm the crossroads where "a mutation
Meets its context," and I mean that
As close to literally as such a weird
Amalgamation of abstractions
And fused metaphors can be made.
I myself am the crossroads and the god
Contained in this inelegant roadside bend
Where no one would suspect temptation
For anything worse than a picnic lunch
And a covert pee behind a gnarly-barked tree trunk.
I'm not that in the dark about how this world works,
But I don't fit it, I don't, and I don't comprehend it,
And I'm wanting to know how it ends
At least a moment before I forget.

Beaver, Utah, 27 August 2016

The prettiest dead moth I ever saw,
Or at least the most elaborately patterned,
A pink, black, and silver confection,
Was lying half-camouflaged
On the oil-blackened cement
By the fuel pumps of a small Sinclair station,
And the cashier told an old man
In dungarees who flirted with her
That yes, her day was just okay, not good,
Not having a good day at all. But I was,
Sheepishly and for no good reason,
Since I ached in most
Of my dysfunctional joints and was
Nearly as old as the old flirt
And fatter and falling apart
And probably soon to be as broke.
But you don't know where or why
Grace will descend, when
The prettiest dead moth might fly.