The Wonders of Information and Oddities of Existence, Winderland Lane, Utah, 30 September 2016

I waited by my devices for a message to come through I knew
Was never coming through. I was determined not to miss it
Anyway. The day refused to even pause for me. The lights
Shifted their positions continuously. A different message
Than the one I waited for, have been waiting for so long,
Arrived in the form of an uploaded photograph of a painting.
A neighbor had seen it in a gallery down the road and thought
It looked remarkably like my daughter. I agreed and studied it
As I sat in the shade nursing my bemusement at coincidence.
The afternoon shrugged its sunny shoulders. Could be. Could be.

Broken Ribs, St. George, Utah, 29 September 2016

I held my breath. I stayed behind a desk.
I did not offer anyone the information that would give me away.
When the morning brought a little rain,
I did not turn my head to my window,
Much less walk back out to my parked car
To roll up its windows. Let it get wet. In the afternoon
I attempted to make my methodical departure
Look less like strain, pain, or incapacity,
More like solemn dignity. I waited a long while
Near a green shade on a patch of gravel,
Considering what advice I would give
To myself thus immobilized and sipping
Small sips of warm air with the sun on my neck.
Take a breath. Not too deep. Not too shallow. Take a breath.
Everything we know comes true, the way we go.
Everything we know true comes true, and away we go.
I eased into my seatbelt, winced, and drove slowly home.

Pine Valley Mountain, Utah, 28 September 2016

The time came when we began to realize rules were not the rule.
Rules were little intricate homes and stadia we built inside the rule.
Our minuscule adventure of living and planning, judging and deciding,
Crying or crowing about our random results would be over soon,
Whereas we preferred to survey the immediate landscape, touch hands,
And think that the years were not behind us but hazy and marvelous
As mountains, still to be lived. A saddle of red sandstone sagged
From that perspective like a half-fallen drapery from a pale marble sculpture,
A shawl from the shoulders of a young person proud of bare shoulders,
Revealing the greyish-green mass of the laccolith beyond that rested
Death's weary head on the neck of that airy maiden. Children
Got out of a navy-blue minivan in the foreground with their mother
Who read the brass plaque affixed to the settler's homestead. Did they live
And die here? Yes, they did. It's so small. It's so small. It's so small. How
Did they all fit? Things were harder then, honey. Be grateful. Can we go?
Mom? Mom? Can I sit in the front seat this time? It's still not unlocked.
You have to sit in the back. You're too small. It's not safe. That's the rule.

How to Greet a Ghost, Zion, Utah, 27 September 2016

I tried out every trick I knew to help him, white-hair haloed
Gentleman who spoke elegantly in the classics I couldn't read.
I could hear in the very gentleness of his dwindling garden of words
What was extinguishing the fading remainder of him. Mnemosyne.
So like her to whisper intimately in the poet's ear, I'm leaving.
He stood and swayed among the invasive trees, smiling faintly.
I tried. I said what I could: Greetings, you who suffered the painful thing;
You have never endured this before. I cannot say I have either.
I would speak to you in perfect hexameters,
But I have to tell you, Orpheus can't help us.
See that cottonwood beside the white rock down in the meadow?
Don't linger there. You'll forget everything then, and be like all the rest
Of the universes that flowered, considered themselves, and left.
Go the other way. Tell the guardians you're thirsty, a child of the night,
The gods, the stars. All you have to do, Merwin, is remember this.

Sandy Wash, Snow Canyon, Utah, 26 September 2016

It had begun to unnerve me, the way the nonhuman
World had, for nearly a fortnight now, kept beckoning
With a voluptuous calm easily mistaken for kindness,
While my brain raced with the metropolitan traffic
Of fender-bending social contending for righteous conversation.
The sand in the wash, scrawled by the relentlessness of ants,
Should not have inspired any thoughts of comfort in me,
But it did. What was the interior theater doing that it should
Want to embrace the play of a characterless world?
I thought of the urns of my mother and father, my late wife
And unborn daughters, ash finer than the sand or the pumice
Drifting down wash from the sumptuous, careless black cubes spilled
Across the cracked cliffs. In what sense had they returned
To the world in which all thoughts have first to disintegrate?
We only return by evaporating, evanescing, not being,
Which is like saying the day only returns by its sunset.
The stars, by the way, were lyric this morning before dawn,
The crescent moon slender enough not to outshine them,
My one living daughter bright enough to pick out the constellations
Pointed out to her, Orion and Draco, then return to the house,
Demand paper, draw the hunter and dragon: "I moved the stars
Closer together, so they could make a scene." Drama
Permeated the pencilled standoff, and somehow she had drawn,
Without knowing the story, Saint George and the Dragon,
Tarhunt and Illuyanka all over again. Later, where the lava
Stretched, fire exhausted on the all-absorbing sand, I thought
And wished I hadn't thought, that maybe the world thinks something
Other than us but through us, something calling us, understand.

Trugeranos, After Smith Mesa, 25 September 2016

We shuffled around in the red sand, looking for debitage,

The chert and obsidian flakes among the piñon and juniper

And old hearths, stray beer tabs, some broken glass and shotgun shells,

Horse dung moldering under some trees, cow patties under others,

The shoulder spine of a long-dead doe, rather small to have been shot.

Across the canyon, a sheep trailer and a cowboy cabin, more mesa,

And beyond that, Hurricane Mesa with its sixty-year old supersonic

Flying monkey rocket sled launch testing site, now privately owned.

Keep Out. I could not for the life of me figure out the distortions

In the doe's twisted fragment of spine that made her bones monstrous

To me as mine would be to anyone other who found them this way,

In the detritus of passing strategies. Her back looked like a fanged tail,

A tiny dragonling. Remember how the Greeks repaid the Seleucid king

For his marvelous gift of real tigers by returning him the nonexistent,

Nonsense monster, the trugeranos? The world is all one 

Such a monster to me, such a monster to the world. Poor doe.

God Art, Red Cliffs, 24 September 2016

"Everything is stretched," went one fragmentary inscription.

I'm sure the poet behind it felt it. In the morning, before dawn,

I entertained the notion that art is a constrained, infallible deity,

Capable of wringing the most creativity possible from each of us,

Absolutely determined to do so, but no more. Art thus orchestrates

Each existence, portioning out whatever amounts of success and suffering

Maximize our creative output. When humans, say, Rimbaud, Plath,

Yield the most from sensing and approaching an early doom, 

Doom them. If plaudits or a long life could create more, better,

Give them that. Poverty to those who make the most of it.

Neither hesitate to goad Monet with a lottery prize if that's the ticket,

Nor ignore the mediocre. Art does what it can to get what it can

From us. Only once it's got as much as we've got to give does it get

Indifferent, letting a Wordsworth dawdle on to nothing, and who cared?

In a tiny circle of ruined Mormon settler houses cut from ancient sandstone

Compressed of more ancient dunes and recently begun to be blown back

To sand again from crumbling surfaces, I sat and watched the desert light

Stretch like a great, tawny saber-toothed cat, contented until it was extinct,

And then I drove home in the dark, unaccompanied, so I wished to think.

Dark Jinn Ride, Zion Canyon Highway, 23 September 2016

My object had been to show what I'd found, nothing

I'd been looking for. The inscription on the slave's tomb,

For instance, was translatable as "I am well-favored,

I who possess a tomb that is better than freedom."

One can't help but suspect that the living slave

Would have disagreed, but, being freely dead, why not,

What the hell, sure, let the owner's paid poet compose

Whatever the owner wants on my grave. Death is better

Than that marginal distinction among the slaves to living

Called for some freedom. All week I had been noticing

The rapturous plenitude of the unmerciful world

Versus the petty meanness of all my social interactions.

In between this, this, this canyon-carving schism of perception

Was more and less of me, caught right in the middle of the overload,

Flash-flood debris that canyons funnel, that carves the canyons away.

On the back of local Park Service shuttle buses there's a public service

Poster of a horrific, hurtling catastrophe of rocks, mud, branches

And whole logs lunging up at you, the hard, wild horses of the dark jinn 

Over the caption, "Think you can swim in this?" Thanks

For helpfully, humanly scaring me, but there's no sidestepping

This universe in this universe, so, yes, I do, I will have to, I can.

Creative Writing Exercise, Dixie Campus, 22 September 2016

Four puppeteers from Las Vegas rented your house for the summer.

You came home after three months to discover

Things mostly clean and tidy, but the following

Odd artifacts scattered around, under the bed,

Behind the couch, in the backs of kitchen drawers:

A nightshade, half a dozen unused maxi pads, 

Three cookie trays coated in blue paint, an unmarked pill bottle,

Empty, a woman's black undergarment, a man's black undergarment,

A paintball gun in the garage, a realtor's sign in the shed,

A cracked picture frame that used to hold a whimsical drawing

Of small animals wearing fairy masks, gone.

Write a story combining all these artifacts in the narrative.

Make it a study of character, not an exercise in plot.

Use realistic dialogue. Be unreliable yourself.

Driving my Daughter to School from Zion, 21 September 2016

It occurred to me that we have to address things directly,

Even knowing that it's an anthropomorphic mistake

And that they'll never answer back, because of what we are.

We can't feel connected to any being we don't talk to.

It's for our own sake we need to pretend to talk to the trees,

If we want to have any sense of being rooted in this world.

All the way down the canyon highway this morning,

I addressed myself to shops, trees, bridges, cliffs, and rocks.

My daughter in the back seat agreed it was wise

To say hello to the fairies and good morning to the ponies

But she wanted nothing to do with saluting the lumpen stones.

Academy, Hurricane, Utah, 20 September 2016

The two kindergarteners who arrived at school first,

Just as someone was unlocking the chain-link gate,

One being dropped off by her father, the other

Running up the sidewalk well ahead of her older brother,

Greeted each other with cautious interest, 

Having only met the day before. Both were blonde,

The one with straight and gleaming hair,

The one with tightly tangled curls,

And their arriving teacher asked 

The one with a new purple lunch box,

The one with an old pink backpack

To play together while they waited, but then

Asked the one who coughed a ragged cough

If first she needed some breakfast today. Yes.

Tunnel Information, Virgin, Utah, 19 September 2016

The Black-eyed Susans nodded through the passenger window.

The exact procession of ten minutes went like this:

Compact blue rental sedan disgorged a bearded young man

And a young woman with dark brown hair streaked blue and pink,

Both of them in black tees and black harem pants, holding cameras

With which they took pictures of each other against the landscape;

Well-scuffed white sedan with Saskatchewan plates let out

A pearish white-haired woman with pale ale complexion 

Who read the posted information silently then climbed back in;

Shiny black Mercedes Sprinter camper van, a-c unit on the roof,

California tags, pulled to within a hand's breadth of the sign, paused

And rolled back onto the road; another Sprinter, silver, pulled in behind,

Stayed in the middle of the pull-out a few minutes, then left;

Five Harley Davidson motorcycles, each featuring a thickset man

And a thickset woman seated behind, all in dark leather, rumbled and leaned

Until some effortful shouting over the engines ended in everyone

Roaring out again; large white Ram pickup with six wheels

Hauling a camper trailer as long as the whole pull-out pulled through,

The back of the trailer displaying its model logo, "FREEDOM."

Pa'rus Trail, Zion, 18 September 2016

I wouldn't have chosen to try it myself, all that struggling

Down through the broken rocks and sand to get within wading distance

Of the green and tan water, but there I sat crouched in tattered shade,

My bare feet caked in mud, no idea if I would ever make it back

Along a path so easy for the ordinary, so stupidly risky for me,

Cottonwood tossing over me, small family beside me.

I am the voice that haunts my author, the one he hates in his mind's ear,

The one who, when the day is hot and the stream is rushing cool,

Instead of poems, says things like this: Ghosts are liars. 

That's how we pass through you. We don't pass through walls. 

We pass through your thoughts. It's possible to walk around, so to speak, 

Among the living and be mistaken for someone alive, but we have to lie 

And we have to be good at it. Catch us out and we're gone to even ourselves. 

We only wish we could haunt you with you knowing we're here. 

Whenever you know we're here, we're gone. Things like that, I say.

Owl Flower, Springdale, Utah, 17 September 2016

Another benign day looked kindly on my fraught shenanigans.

A small child gave a toy owl a flower and me both owl and flower.

The morning was cool, the afternoon sunny and hot. What more

Do we need to know about anything than these basics? 

Everything ominous waited somewhere else, although

The little annoyances of people, even the small ones,

Even especially me continued to exasperate me.

A harvest moon would have to suffice the hungry night.

Beaver, Utah, 16 September 2016

A chain-sawed log sculpture of a cartoon beaver in work clothes held up a sign.
"I Love Beaver!" A woman about to enter the store saw it and asked
"Isn't that also a crude innuendo?" Answered in the affirmative,
She shook her head in disgust. "And they're making money off of it."
The dun and honey straw grass stretched away to the horizon.
I looked at my feet and saw nothing remarkable on the cement ground,
One of those rare days when the world seemed more warmhearted
Than the people struggling to get by in it.

Revising Pascal's Wager, I-15 Southbound, 15 September 2016

In Dell, Montana, where the gas station features taxidermy and camouflage
And the Boston terrier Buster guards the door,
A pickup truck with a bed of dead cow, bred for slaughter,
That ended up roadkill, pulled up to a lonely pump for fuel.
Two cows had been cut up and crammed into the back,
And of course they were both already torn up some beforehand,
So that the bed of the truck was a level-filled mattress
Of bright red meat, torn black patches of hide, and the odd hoof.
Pascal, who once figured life as a courtyard full of condemned men
Awaiting random execution, should have known better than to parse
His wager the way he did. The more honest configuration goes like this:
If all the evidence of the world is correct, then death ends our existence,
No more talking, doing, feeling, or self-reflecting. In that case,
A bet on death yields nothing and a nothing from which nothing
Can be taken away. If, on the other hand, the evidence of the world misleads
Us, we have no way of knowing in what way we have been misled
Until we test our death. So those are the possible outcomes for any bet
On death: nothingness or the wholly unknown. It's not a wager to win
Or lose. It's a wager on a discovery that's impossible to live. Bet?

Nococco, Missoula, Montana, 14 September 2016

Dream of a toy convention, metallic tabletop toys whirring and winking
But making no noise. The gods made me a wanderer,
And then nobody wanted to be me, not even me.
I stayed at the toy convention all night and woke frantic
Thinking I had overstayed and been captured by a cult
Disguised as a pyramid scheme, disguised as a corporation
Calling itself Nococco. I woke up already destitute
It would seem by my own design, no one to blame, no one to sue,
Silly me. Drove back south from autumn into dwindling summer,
Checked into the inn on the Clark Fork River, imagined it
At the bottom of a giant lake, then emptying in the great flood,
Then running out, running dry. It's only the movement of passing water
Gives the illusion of a river. As much as I am afraid of pain
When dying, I want to rush out to meet death with joy when I die.

Becker's Beach, Slocanada, 13 September 2016

The final day of the tablet is untranslatable and inscribed upside down.
My heart filled with something that might have been grief but poured out as joy.
It was the last of everything, the last day of the visitor to his own home.
There was the morning at the Silverton Slip, father and daughter
Building a fairy house on the picnic table, waiting for warmth to swim,
The occasional stray peripatetic pensioner, with or without dog
Pausing to ask and/or relate information about circulating bears.
Then the first swim, barely a dive, then the second. Noon.
There was the farewell luncheon over olive sandwiches and plum crumble.
There was Bigelow Bay, one last time, out where the children drowned
After tipping their canoe, where it seemed like half the poems
Of six years and a day were composed, where the visitor first came home,
The water like a stack of windows giving on infinity under the glacier.
There was the fish knife the daughter found, the sunken boat ladder,
Farewell to the gas station attendant and the lottery vendor,
To the RCMP officer and the recently legal alien from the plains,
To Nonie Diana the Famous Poet, to Rebekkie Mama, to Wendy,
The third swim, fourth swim, fifth swim, each time maybe one more,
The happy patient outliving every relapse and starting to feel immortal,
And finally the final swim, wilderness about to block out the sun.
I sprinted out on a single breath, tearing into the late gold lake
Like a bear tearing into honey, twisting to see the cherry tips of maples
Lining the shore where the pilings of the first wharf, a century gone,
Lurk, dark pillars of.a mythical lost kingdom, below the gleam,
And I dove down, slapped a broken snag of one such, deeper,
Snatched a white rock glowing on the bottom, surfaced into setting sun.

Bigelow Bay, Slocanada, 12 September 2016

The only sense in which it is not absurd to project intentions onto the nonhuman universe
Is the sense that we are all, apparently, products of the way this world has been happening
And that therefore, given our own obsession with intentions,
The capacity for intentions must have been latent in the cosmos since whenever
And may yet be expressed in other ways than through us.
My thoughts ran in this direction as my bank account ran out,
As my days in the corner most home dwindled from two to one,
As the sun shone, a squirrel defended a tree, a sweat bee landed on my thumb,
I wondered what the world meant to do with me,
Little puffy clouds graced Valhalla, and the lake reflected.

Centennial Park, Slocanada, 11 September 2016

With a week of brilliant sunshine in the southeastern BC forecast,
On the one day of the annual Hills Garlic Festival it rained.
Among the crowd, there were those, predictably, who grumbled
And those who enthused at the sight of double rainbows over the lake
And me, who spoke darkly and monotonously of irony
And found a seat in the sun, but out of the rain. Good bear.
Hundreds, perhaps a thousand or two people evidencing
Various predictive strategies for a day at an outdoor festival
With the weather all up in the air wandered around and around me,
Bareheaded or hatted, in jackets or under umbrellas or not,
Although the teens who preferred to show up in shorts or swim wear
Were conspicuously nowhere. About to be nowhere myself
And therefore seeing all of this as about to have never have been,
I nevertheless thought about yesterday, previous festivals,
A year ago, six, eight, as if they had ever been here, as if here
Were where they had been, and tomorrow when the sun will
Or will already have had returned, and the vendors will be gone
And the crowds, and my family and me and our stories,
And if I have ever come back here myself after that
It will not be me, not be here that will be here, not here.

Centennial Park, Slocanada, 10 September 2016

Everyone had a story about bears that day.

In the cabin, in the morning, the count was seven

Seen on trail, in town, the day before, one grizzly.

Mama and a cub. Mother and two cubs. Sow and three cubs,

Depending on who was talking. Damage to the fences,

Visitors stuck in their rental all week with bears outside

The picture window, going to town on the plum trees.

In the Apple Tree, no talk around the tables of politics,

Only of bears. "Went out on my porch at midnight,

Just to have a smoke, hey? Saw what I thought was a garbage bag,

You know, one of 'em big black sacks in the middle of my lawn--"

"A bear dragged it there?" "Nope. Turned on my porch light

And it was a bear, hey, just sitting there blinking at me."

Bear scat on the sidewalks. Photos on smart phones,

One of a grizzly that cleared out a campground, far side of the lake.

"I'm sick of all the bear stories," said the Rev. Therese Deschamp,

"It's all anyone has to talk about anymore." Bear reared up

In front of a car. Bear chased a boy on a bike. Crazy boy

Spotted on the bridge eating a sandwich, not ten steps from a bear.

I sat in the park, watching my daughter perform stunts in the playground.

I was special. I had nothing to say. I hadn't seen a bear.

Hearing Voices Nearing Valhalla, 9 September 2016

The man with the silver ponytail and the cherry-red camper van nodded.
"Who is my you?" I thought I heard him ask no one, "my most true you?"
Or I heard what I wanted to hear. No one else was at the rest stop.
The vault toilet in the pines had recently been repainted and cleaned.
Gone was the graffiti that had made me wonder why we learn to write.
The river murmured greenly alongside. The highway murmured, too,
Mostly in the opposite direction. I was happy to wait a while
And to feel lucky to have returned, more or less, to something like this.
I counted the times I had passed through this similar vortex
And then I turned the car down a side road I'd never explored.
It was a sunny, end-of-summer afternoon in British Columbia,
And after having conjured such a lost mountain moment for myself
At my world's end, or near there, I was in no hurry there anymore.
The road was narrow, eloquent, and new through the woods,
Bits of color already letting the dead peep through.
I'd left the cherry-red van down behind, at least for a little,
And I looked at the unfurling daylight, thought of home,
And murmured, nodding, to every sight and every thought.
I could love you. I could love you. I could love you. Be my you.

Concerto, Default-Mode Network, I-15 Northbound, 8 September 2016

These days, people prefer the flavor of awareness provided by the thalamus
Straight, without all that distracting business of mind merely muttering to itself
About the past and the future, what's been done, oh well, might be done.
That's all my meditation was in the car during my long day's driving,
Just a nonexistent interpreter discussing nonexistence with itself
As the curving, cornering, cantering, cambered, changing world swirled
And exchanged infinities of differences and similarities for fresh infinities,
The woman at the pump in Scipio shouting out driving directions
Involving haystacks and tractors and dirt roads not to go down
To another woman laughing, "I'm not redneck but I'm countrified enough
To know what that means!" The mountains scrolled by, right and left,
Familiar but not to be trusted, never the same. The mind
Kept chattering to itself, reviewing prior dates and journeys.
More road, more mountains, a radio station playing
"A brand new recording of Mozart's last piano concerto,"
Which you would think would be identical to its digital self
Every time played, but it wouldn't. Examine any stillness carefully
Enough, and we discover motion. If the quantum physicists are correct,
Even at absolute zero in the vacuum of deep space, subatomic particles wink
In and out of existence. Conversely, slice any moment
However fine, we always find more rapid changes.
Stillness is a ruse. There is no end to changing. Rivers
Passed under me passing over them. Thirty years ago
I looked at an idyll and wrote, "See that gilded angler
In the valley's only river? We'll come back
To this later." I proved a prophet like any other. Today I arrived
Back where the names and appearances would all suggest
I had kept my promise, down to a sunset-gilded angler casting
In the same-named river. But I hadn't, not really, and someday
Someone will write and rewrite the last piano concerto.

The Electric Theater, Tabernacle Street, 7 September 2016

The light was white bright on the street at noon.
Respectably dressed white people with white hair crossed
Between the bright white lines of the crosswalk
And entered the cool, dark theater, me among them.
The seats filled up. The lights went down.
The ambient sounds of Moby caressed us,
And the screen filled with a flying scene above Epupa Falls
In Kaokaland, then cut to a kraal and a small, ashy fire
Where a Himba elder no older than the theater audience
Murmured about witchcraft, drought and the death of Himba culture.
Just as I realized I could smell the elder, the strong sage odor,
The butter and dung-perfumed ochre, a disoriented memory--
The Himba woman hitchhiking, sitting tall in the back of my old rented truck
Seven years and more ago, her leather crown brushing the underside of the roof,
Her ochre rubbing into the gray fabric of the seat, calm, going to see her father
At the rural clinic twenty minutes dirt drive distant, that Kaokaland smell
The open grassland carried--I realized I had smelled nothing entering
The theater, despite, presumably, perfumes and hairsprays, nothing.
Nothing is like a memory.

Utah Under Glass, Dixie Campus, 6 September 2016

Seventeen months ago, I walked a formerly local candidate
Who had done her dissertation on instructional word art
Into this room to meet the provost, when she exclaimed
That her uncle, or perhaps it was her grandfather, had made
The giant, glass-topped meeting table that dominates the room.
A mosaic sandstone map of Utah is set into the wood
Beneath the glass. This afternoon in the dim room
With the shuttered blinds and the projector hanging
Perilously over the pieces shaping the heart of southern Utah,
I placed hands flat on the glass, feeling the hum
Of twenty minor campus administrators discussing
What should be done about fees and course outcomes,
And it dawned on me that the candidate had only come
To see the giant table her kin had made, never intending
To accept any offer of return here to her air-conditioned home.
I splayed my crooked fingers wider and noticed a brass plate
Fastened to my end of the massive geography. It read
"Utah table made under the direction," but the line below
Had been blurred away by however many bellies and laps
Had leaned against the edge, pressing some conversation.
Or she could have been lying, or been lied to by her kin,
I thought, about who actually created this particular state,
And reflections of the projector colored the glass.

East Zion Turnout, 5 September 2016

Labor Day in the United States, the hundred-year old

National Park Service straining to process another long weekend,

The end of summer holidays. The visitors were already draining

Back out of the park by sunset, Monday, with the bulk of the locals

Or relatively locals, the plump families with school-age children, mostly gone.

The trails still rather bustled with people from overseas, fit young adults 

And wan silver-haired elders, European and East Asian, by and large.

Well, what of it? The rocks looked like the rocks. The weather was typical,

Sunny and robin's-egg blue and pretty hot, but no longer brutal.

I took the truck for a pointless drive through the crowds across to the east side,

Where the trailheads boast a small parking lot and a picnic table

And a variety of familial memories for me. A landscape, a vivid,

Corrugated landscape that's easy to recognize, hard to forget,

Seems to demand some kind of response, to suggest that here is a place

That is firm enough for you to rappel your way back down by,

Although there is a long tunnel drilled right through the heart of it,

And every time it rains hard or snows then thaws they have to close 

The roads to clear away the latest fallen rubble, and the shapes

That we most love to photograph with our flitting selves posed against them

Are all cracking and falling erratically as we snake in exhausting, constant lines

Through the middle of them, millions of us, shouting and documenting

How we travelled to show that we have seen such giant, magnificent fractures

In person, us, the ones you know from other contexts, see, we were there.

Translations, Brian Head, 4 September 2016

In the argot of physicists it meant changing your place.
I am not a physicist, and I do not believe in place.
There never was a space, no spacetime, only change. The room was loud
With the wall unit roaring to life over and over all night.
I dreamed and then dreamed that I dreamed,
And then dreamed that I was annoyed by the idiocy
And irrelevance of all my dreaming. But how could I find them
Irrelevant, to what? If this universal heap of sweepings
Must always have been moving in all measures, and it was,
Like the ever-changing light outside my room,
Like forever redacted stories about bright suns and dark suns,
Gods and explosions and angels and black holes
Decorating the day and the night, never once in their place,
Then in reference to what, exactly, were my dreams
Irrelevant or not? I sat at my dining table
At the end of the day, my table, my day, the blue
On blue on blue desert sky rhyming
With previous cloudless passages I'd known,
And sensed the lamp light at my back creeping up
On me, predatory. It seems I had been through
Yet another sequence accelerating my rate
Of translation, this time from mountaintop to canyon floor,
The automatic hotel heater roared. I had left the window ajar all night.

Mammoth Creek Road, 3 September 2016

I woke with dread in my gut and before I got far up the road
A pretty creature, sleek and ochre with a black-ash tipped tail,
Maybe a ferret or a type of weasel, ran out in front of my wheels.
I thought it might turn and dash back or speed up and make it through,
But it ran without alteration and I felt it hit a wheel.
I looked up but the vehicle behind me was already over it.
So a thing with desires and some sort of awareness came to an end.

I drove on, higher, through the cinder cone and lava plateaus.
The flows here were recent, so recent geologically
That the pine and aspen in these high country basalt landscapes
Look like survivors of the stones that overwhelmed them,
Although the freshest black rocks that tumbled stopped
At least one to five thousand years ago,
And the trees just got a grip in the past few centuries.

One handsome pronghorn stood in those pine shadows in basalt rubble,
Alone and engaged in no apparent behavior other than breathing.
It seemed improbable to me, that a creature of grass and speed
Was so high in wooded country and near so many bow hunters
On recon with their pickup trucks and roaring ATVs,
But what do I know of how life goes?

Ashdown Gorge Wilderness, 2 September 2016

Thirty-two hundred meters above sea level
And four weeks since I last sat on a pebbled flat
Pocked with small, scampering crabs scrabbling peekaboo
In the damp stone shadows as the Salt Spring Island tide rolled in,
I roll memories around in my mouth for their terroir
And the stupid pleasure of feeling how lucky I am
To have memories of having passed through such enviable names.
I shall have to be punished for my good fortune. Fortune
Itself shall be required to do the punishing, poor abstraction.
Bristlecone pines lurk near these arrowy spruce. Tense,
I can't settle on the best tense. This wind would have been
Brisk or even punishing, had I dared to set up a tent.
But I was intent on a short walk in the high country, that's all,
Nothing too daring. A sharp gust recalls that the beautiful
Well-surveyed, bounded pitches that get renamed wilderness
Generally remained more or less unoccupied by villages
Long enough to become said wilderness because villagers
Preferred not to live in them. It's never easy to settle vast passages.
It was hot, earlier, when I drove through Mountain Meadow,
Way down below these windy breaks, out on the paths of less resistance,
And visited the monument to a passing massacre on my roundabout way
From ordinary afternoon at work in town to this elevated vantage point.
No one was at that memorial as no one is now on the Rattlesnake Trail.
Winter will settle here soon enough, and skiers and snowmobiles,
And I'll be as much thoughts of those as they'll be the thoughts of the meadow.

Le roi du silence, The Watchman, 1 September 2016

Here we play a game. Whoever is the most 

Successful at keeping quiet despite the most

Outrageous provocations wins. Are you ready,

Children? Begin. Wait, no! Professor, I'm not ready,

I want to talk and talk.  I was under the cliffs at sunset

Just waiting for a load of laundry and savoring evening air

After a bit of rain and wind had broken the heat, alone

And in a quiet town, despite the tourists just blocks away,

And so all was ordinary and peaceful and birds

Were the noisiest chatterers, socializing in the greenery

Ahead of bed on a branch for the night, a fine glow

On the sandstone above all, also quiet, of course,

And I thought of the news item I'd heard this morning

Driving the highway outside Toquerville, a report

That French preschoolers and kindergarteners

Were now being trained to know how to be silent

During a terrorist attack by playing a game

Formerly used to calm rowdy groups of them.

A game is any charmed circle where the rules

Outside the circle, that are nature and can't be gainsaid,

Are disguised by the inside-the-circle rules that we made,

In which we pretend that we can't say for sure who will win

Until we play, can't say who could be the one king

Among us we know is the king of silence.