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.

A Series of Fairly Simple Declarative Sentences in an Old Grocery Store, St. George, 11 October 2016

In Maine, in January, 1940, one declared, "There isn't any thought
Or idea which can't be expressed in a fairly simple declarative sentence."
He was complaining about the "rhetorical secrecy" of the tax code,
But he could as well have been discussing poetry (which he did,
In an earlier essay, much too diffidently or mock-diffidently at least).
When one has no thoughts or ideas, of course, one remains hesitant
To declare so. I declare, I was just about tapped out myself
When I caught myself mumbling in a seminar held in a cavern
That used to be the frozen food section of a suburban grocery
Something about genetics and mind I'd written, mind you,
More than a dozen years before. As the mumbling continued
I descended into the secret rhetoric of internal thanatos
And imagined I was flying clear over the whole coded world,
Nothing more to study, nothing to interpret, nor remember, nor declare.

Gallant Monday, Virgin River, 10 October 2016

Dreams were ordinary. Morning chores and quarrels
Were ordinary. Off to school, off to work, off to eat lunch,
Ordinary, ordinary, ordinary. Leaving the office
By the ordinary way, making the usual goodbyes,
That would be the way, the best way to approach
The cessation. A woman who had lived a few lives
And written many stories without apologizing
Came to mind, the words of one of her fictions
Dangling from the late afternoon, tangled like old fishing lines
In the branches near the river. We cease to be
And after that it makes absolutely no difference
Whether or not we were forgotten. We had no addictions,
No cravings, no use for anything other than our destination.
We had lost the sensitive antennae essential
For wanderers, and in the rain the doctor wept unnoticed.

Back-Channeling, Weeping Rock, Zion, 9 October 2016

Grunting encouragement and nodding my head,
I watched my daughter bicycle in the empty lot
Then skip down to the creek below the busy trail
To search for dragonflies and toads. The hikers shuffled by
Above, on their way up and down like Jacob's angels, above
Where I've ever been. I half believe this world
Is veracious enough to exist outside of me,
And I plan and fantasize as if it will carry on
When I'm gone, but I half suspect it won't.
My daughter demanded I stop writing this poem.
Uh-huh, I said, uh-huh, uh-huh, encouraging
Her to keep trying, myself to buy time to write.

World, Web, Zion, 8 October 2016

"I want to share a radius smile" said the caption
Of the widely smiling Moroccan man in the photo he chose
For the website on which volunteers from around the world
But mostly from Europe sought to match up with hosts
Who had tasks and chores, beds, homes, and businesses
In desirably exotic or peaceful places. Cheap, rewarding
Travel that transcended tourism for the largely young
Volunteers, and cheap, rewarding help around the farm,
Hostel, commune, or country home for the hosts.
It felt like compulsive window-shopping to browse the site,
A quick visit to an alternative, happier, more organic, spiritual planet
With prettier pictures than the one on the news, one click removed,
For a visitor like me, always and only a tourist in the actual world.

Kassidy Keeps Her Cards in Order, St. George, Utah, 7 October 2016

I had a student in my office who disliked how I shuffle things,
Books and music, quotations, disciplines, bad ideas.
Where I prefer a tarot deck, she prefers a stack of slides
Ready for presentation: (1) Free fall is the natural, unforced state
Of motion. (2) It was all a swoon, from first gasp to last,
A lovely swan dive into life, a pool sometimes empty,
Sometimes full. (3) The self was the story I told,
The story that told itself it was a story that could tell itself.
(4) Coherence could not be confused with sitting still,
Not even when seated and listening to a student
Berate the traffic as it tumbled by outside. Therefore,
She concluded, the fall is not itself falling, falling is self.
I shuffled her tautology, escape made loose I looped.

Last Rounder Song, Virgin, Utah, 6 October 2016

The cows hid but made their presence known on the breeze.
The tourists drove, paused, drove along the road above,
And the cows ignored them. The hawks hunted or waited,
And the ravens patrolled the road for recent extinctions.
The rounder sat under a cotton tree, listening to recordings
Singing rounds and counting down the vague remaining days
Until the end of time for him began another round for those
With better ways. Who laid time in the shade and gave her
Every dime he made, did all he did, said all he had to say;
Who couldn't make a living in this way, couldn't rock the cradle,
Couldn't sing the song, couldn't hang around and still be gone.

Hawk Scream, Harrisburg, Utah, 5 October 2016

I listened to the radio, the BBC, bouncing via satellite
From a booth or a disk, a planet's half turn ahead of me,
Windows open, tumbledown sandstone and yellowing cottonwoods
In front of me, as they interviewed the terminal and the elderly,
Keen to know, for them to tell us, how they most wished they had been.
Why do we strive to compile the regrets of the dying?
What do we possibly think we're preventing?
Why is it unbearably melancholy to imagine
This wide world is as it evidences itself to be,
Everything really everything, nothing really nothing,
No plan, no mistakes, no alternative to this cosmos
That happens to be, infinitely subdivided indefinitely,
Containing the desire and the math to explain itself
And predict itself probably, but never beyond what was,
Never was? Meaning: given meaning, what could it mean
It never meant anything more than that hawk's scream?

Shadow of West Temple, Zion, 4 October 2016

I stood in our moonless courtyard before dawn, swaying sleepily,
Looking at the nonsense splatter of stars, doing the human thing
Myself, throwing meaning. Perhaps they face a common enemy,
The dragon and the hunter, the serpent, tail draped over the vault's arch
From the north, the square-shouldered knight in the south,
The monster and the trickster, the treasure lurking in its mountain lair,
The storm god hurling lightning from the sky, the animal, the cultural,
And that's what we always got wrong. The hunter pulls his bow and aims
Near the same spot toward which the serpent aims its open jaws.
What are they attacking? Defending? What alarms them, fierce creatures?
Something that couldn't be glimpsed from my perspective, me, little person
Who can casually talk of dragging loves with him to witness his disaster.
It is disaster, whatever it is, disaster hidden behind the great scalloped wall
Of West Temple, blackest in starlight, in the dark beyond, forever west.
Just taste the word, once-glittering star crunched like glass in the mouth.
Negative star, non-star, not out there, disaster. That's what Orion's aiming at.
That's why Draco recoils and opens his fanged mouth light years. We've been
Fooling ourselves, lying to ourselves that they're up there
Fighting each other, those poor, scattered sparks flaring up
Briefly, when all's said and done, before their common enemy,
Storied altar of stories, of sacrifice, all-swallowing dark.

Watching the Clouds Shrug Farewell, Emptiness, Utah, 3 October 2016

Darkness, ecstasy, anxiety, terror, hope,
Hope beyond hope, component of the foolishness fueled all the rest.
Rest. Let the acronym for the decision least likely to be your own rest.
Why would anyone run down the hill, the gentle slope I rolled down
With the full knowledge of what momentum meant
And a beautiful view of the clarity with which the meadow grass
Terminated in a line of clear blue empty sky? I didn't think
I would soar into that sky, after all, nor hang suspended.
Something in me loathed the edge but loved rolling
In the grass and the flowers, faster and faster, wanted the drop
To be over. Too bad I risked entangling loved humans with me.
Lying in the grass, face ever so briefly returned to the air,
I thought what turn was the no return and realized
I would have had to shed myself to save myself from myself,
As at every opportunity to embrace this native soil
Of soft, accelerating surrender to accept, I accepted.
Aching ribs and all, I rolled over again, feeling grounded,
Supported by the whole mass of the earth a moment longer,
Although I felt the gap to open under me, last emotion, as well.

Apraxia Near Empty Amphitheater Stage, Zion, 2 October 2016

Knowledge without demonstration was all the skill I ever knew,
All sorts of monsters in my nature less possible than chimeras or centaurs.
The hills were shadows and they flowed. The story, as ever, remained
In charge. The rebels charged, words who had escaped the tales made them.
Again, our petty scoundrels came to the crumbling lip of the precipice.
They could tell you all about the sort of narrative could rescue them,
But they were only free words, doomed words, and they could not
Actually narrate the ingenious rope with which they could escape
The monsters, down the hills, evading the noose with which they hanged
Themselves at the end of the perilous descent, leaving me
To be the phenomenon that called itself a self, words words, tales tales,
And the cliffs beckoning from all sides forgiveness, or better yet, mercy.

Euergetism, West Temple, Zion, 1 October 2016

She might have been dispatched by ghosts to announce their munificence.

She brooded over the West Temple, then the neighborhood 

Of the Anasazi Plateau. She rumbled a little and advanced

Her dove-grey, thickly feathered breast over town and the Watchman,

Threw me one sharp glance, then retreated again into white towers.

I knew what her graciousness and grumbling indicated. A new month

On the Roman calendar, possibly the last, and it was a gift

That I should still be witnessing these acts of the past 

Raising fresh monuments of fine skies, a gift praising itself

For using its own resources to keep me in good weather 

A little while longer who should have been long gone by now.

Last night, a light that could have been a low-flying, leisurely meteor

Or an isolated sidearm twirl of ball lightning, blue, fell over my shoulder

Out of a quietly starlit sky. Today, my daughter went to the library.

Tomorrow or tomorrow, whenever tomorrow's good and yesterday, 

The inscriptions of the storm that were never pronounced today

Will be read from the rocks that themselves can have no memories,

Neither for the good nor for the calamity a calm commands.