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.