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

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

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

Best Friends, Angel Canyon, Utah, 30 December 2016

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

A Bed and a Window, Winderland, 29 December 2016

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Noesis Noeseos Noesis Noel, Winderland, 25 December 2016

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

Christmas Eve Storm in Zion Canyon, 2016

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ampersand Canyon, Zion, 23 December 2016

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

Acid Solution, Rainy Highway, Utah, 22 December 2016

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

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

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

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

All delights were delights of the flesh,

Then as now, and all sorrows likewise.

Heat fell through the colorless window

Since replaced by random rainbowed bits

And sank through my breathing, pulsing chest.

It was as true thirty years ago

As more than a century ago,

As it was thirty minutes to now:

Prayer carved the sable flowers, chorals 

Spun rose windows in the aisle, music

So silk long by arch and colonnade

That these lines trembled out and followed.

Body recalled the industrial 

Cathedral blackened and scaffolded

Even after seven centuries

Of planning and building and bombing,

Incompletion and restoration

Marking an eternity of change.

And body was dreaming in the sun,

Only daydreaming to the last breath

Played in the wheezing chords with pauses,

Longer and longer, that cliffhanger,

Der Abschied. The clear glass was windshield

Not high windows. The sky was over 

Desert mesas not smoking city,

The memory of the cathedral

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

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

Yesterday, the body was reading in a pool of sunlight

In a glowing book, while listening attentively to the small

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

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

Someone else brought home, each little lost insight

Wagging like the short tail of a perfectly obedient spaniel.

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

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

So waggishly myself before: "The experienced qualities of qualia 

Correlate with changes of energy. Colors are a measure

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And the looming changes in energy made qualia feel afraid,

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

Burst from frozen bushes into sun, frantically renewing

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

Off bedroom windows' glaring hard reflections but not falling,

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

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

Putting the Elves in Themselves, Winderland, 18 December 2016

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

Cold Front, Zion, 17 December 2016

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

Surprise Creek, Utah, 16 December 2016

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

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

Saw now how pondering any decision, playing out

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

Balance, Winderland, 15 December 2016

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

Starlight, Southwest Utah, 14 December 2016

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Retreating from the West, 13 December 2016

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

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

Cat Gossip on the Way to School, 12 December 2016

One of the girls carpooling to grade school related to me

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

Of the Same Coin, Winderland, 11 December 2016

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

Quail Creek, 10 December 2016

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

I watched an apparently vacationing couple ride horses around

Through the red rocks and sagebrush, until they disappeared.

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

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

The sixteenth and final track on the soundtrack album

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind dwindled and stopped.

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

A suicidal procrastinator could survive a surprisingly long time.

. . .

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

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

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

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

To reconcile the worlds without breaking the truce between them?

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

Wonderland once was underground. "I'm going

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

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

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

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

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

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

Honeydew, North Plaza, 6 December 2016

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

Pending Heaven, Hurricane, Utah, 5 December 2016

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

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

So late in the lengthening year that even in this desert

Nearly all photosynthesis had quit, including poetry's

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

Made fatuous sunbeams toil to break earth's sleep

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

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

Skimmed off just before impending loss. I have studied

The many artifiscientific practices of prediction, anecdotal,

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

From a distance, mostly, being fascinated but incompetent

Apprentice to that sorcery. Reduction is stronger

Than truncation, wrote the contrarian cosmologist,

To which I would ignorantly add, truncation results

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

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

Of wasted leaves to sprinkle this windless morning

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

Dark and handsome bronze to the last possible hour.

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

Girdling its own asymmetrical roots with a lower halo 

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

But smiling ridiculously in the direct light, much reduced,

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

Trunk gleaming more brightly than ever, untruncated

Yet.

North Fork, 3 December 2016

Had a day when your impersonal world seemed

More personable than yourself? Wind blew hard

Through that wild beauty, the sky, and the creek 

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

Could be heard to have said something nice. Nothing

Seemed to be bent on extinguishing anything singing,

And only my neurons insisted, kibitzing, sotto voce, 

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

On pulling out reams and bolts of old grievances to fluff

From dusty trunks, to consider, to stage shapeless costume 

Dramas of swathed and cloaked memories mumming,

Debating imitation antique drawing room insults and victories

Until the whole thoughtless limbic, hormonal alert system,

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

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

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

The light wrapped around them with intimate consideration

For our infinite, infantile wish for consolation, the world

Briefly resting its head softly against us, commiserating.

At evening when the cold blew through the canyons

And the deer haunted the highways, dead or alive,

I gripped the wheel of my compact, battered vehicle, 

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

To the layers of murmuring, singing, and song,

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

The whoosh of the blood hammering hard at my ears,

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

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

Chorus scored for indifference, concern, and delight,

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

Roadside Hazard, Utah Border, 2 December 2016

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

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

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

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

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