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?