Fireworks, Salt Lake City, New Year’s Eve 2017

They set them off early, first a few individuals
Scattered around residential neighborhoods,
And then a proper display just before ten.
Or they set them off late, as by early afternoon
Online, one could read the reports and see
The clips and pics of completed celebrations
In Polynesia, Hong Kong, Auckland, Sydney.
Who knew what time it really was anywhere?
We didn’t do fireworks for New Year’s Eve
In the neighborhood where I grew up,
And my evangelical family preferred
Watch Night services at our cinderblock church
To New Year’s Rocking Eve on TV. The first
Time I recall firecrackers going off at midnight
Was at the end of 1987, when I was in Hoboken
With a sometime lover and some friends.
It was snowing and people on the street
Were popping off small fireworks randomly.
I drove away down a dark white interstate
And was, as they say, lucky to get home alive.
In 1999 in Chicago, my girlfriend and I spent
The afternoon in bed watching the millennium
Crawl across the globe and when our turn
Came, we stood at the window of our hotel room
Wrapped in a blanket to watch the anticlimax
Of a second-rate display over Lake Michigan.
(Chicago had parceled its fireworks displays
And distributed them around town, fearing
Too large a gathering and the Millenium Bug.)
Las Vegas, New Orleans, Chicago again,
But I didn’t see fireworks for the holiday again
Until I moved to Salt Lake City, in the aughts,
When I would sometimes watch them
From my downtown condo balcony
While my New-Year’s-Eve despising wife slept.
In ‘08, with a new fiancée in Takaka, New Zealand
I watched a pitiful few squibs over a warm bay.
After that, it wasn’t until a couple of years ago
That a new year came in again with a display.
I took my daughter to our small town celebration
Outside Zion, which was set off early enough
For a five year-old. And last year, as a family,
We watched the same charming local show
From our backyard. It was good enough, although
I knew when it started that this year would be
Impossible for us. And then here I was,
An honest revenant at the end, not much,
But still breathing some weeks after freezing,
Back in Salt Lake as a guest, while daughter slept
Next to a glow-in-the-dark flower we’d sculpted
And the complete Harry Potter volumes.
Our hosts-in-law had gone upstairs to bed.
The fireworks were heard from our perspective
As distant, sprinkled gunfire, invisible from here,
And I watched the Times Square ball drop
That I’d only seen in person once, in 1989,
The night my grandfather died in his bed,
And who knew what time really was anywhere?

Thumbs Up, 1500 South, Salt Lake City, 30 December 2017

Nothing like a small house party to prove
That human sociality is dangerous, to humans
In particular. Or perhaps the man who lied
By implication, suggesting he was cheerful
And social and capably human himself, maybe
More capable, even, than most, was just
His own threat to his own well-being,
And the rest of the folks were simply being
Folks being nice. Well, wait, all but one. One
Was like him but more obviously, pacing
The room relentlessly, tugging the ends
Of her hair and smiling only to herself.
He watched, or more accurately, he witnessed
Her and her patterns, and he knew that she
Was the only honest soul in attendance,
The one whose frantic, ritualized routines
Came only to show how cold the rest were,
How cold the cheerful human world, and dumb.
She nodded when he saluted her, in the midst
Of other nonsense, with one raised thumb.

Sugar House Liquor Store, Utah, 29 December 2017

The young stock clerk with the fanciful beard
And waxed moustaches carried open boxes
Of California vintages. His left bicep sported
A detailed tat of a finback whale skull and skeleton.
A customer sent him on a quest for an Arizona
Label that no longer existed. He apologized
For its nonexistence, but the jovial customer
Was happy to blame droughts and fires
And global warming. “This could all be wine
Country someday,” joked the clerk. “Get in
On the ground floor.” Another customer
In the checkout line noticed a local vodka
From the Sugarhouse Distillery, chuckling.
Outside, the Great Salt Lake retreated, but
All kidding aside, people were shopping
More for the end of the year than the world.
It’s only the arbitrary reality one counts on.

The More Things Stay the Change, 28 December 2017

It was the nature of the frog to be compliant
That doomed the pair, not the failure
Of the scorpion to sheath its tail. I had been
This frog on more than one occasion
And was saved the first few times merely
By the fact that it was not a scorpion I bore.
So I knew that I could have been stung
And sunk before, but still it was my nature
To swim across open bodies of water
And to show off how useful I could be,
Homely and awkward on land though I was.
Even my whining to the scorpion at the end,
The part of the affair now famously packaged
As dark morality, only showed that I could not
Grasp my own witlessness in being
So easily persuaded to attempt something
As stupid as to carry a rhetorical scorpion
On my soft, fat, vulnerable back into depths
No scorpion could survive. The last comment
Of the scorpion itself was lost to all but me:
“Why did you cruelly agree to carry me
To where you knew my drowning a certainty?”
Now that I’m a ghost, I can see there’s a reason
No one spots frogs ferrying other species,
And the fact that the scorpion ended
As equally unhappily hardly comforts me.

Half Moon Foothills, 27 December 2017

“What would you do to be guaranteed
One additional, on-demand hour of calm,
Confidence, and pain-free contentment?
What would you do for borrowed wings?
Then don’t condemn the pill thief, the drunk,
The one-armed-bandit lover. Or go ahead,
Son. Maybe condemnation’s the very thing
That does for you what self-destruction
Does for the condemned. Righteousness
Is one proven antidote to hopelessness.
Not one person sneering at the collaborator,
Exposed, the hooker disrobed, the sinner
Of any piquant kind or flavor disclosed breathes
That fire, that curling smoke, without hope.
Righteous anger’s no cure for desperation, true,
But then, neither is any uplifting addiction.
Your human frame’s the result of rewiring
More ordinary reward systems for living
The fit life that leaves more life behind dying
But in such a way that cumulative organization
Balances on individual obsession. Sooner
Than civilization collectively thinks, however,
There won’t be any need for our bodies
Thus framed to win civilizations’ competition.
I’m not kidding, kid. I get off on the notion
That everything we’ve been fine-tuned
To keep in motion will prove irrelevant soon.
Soon we’ll be less than batteries for the words
And numbers carrying on outside of our brains
In anthroformed farmed ecosystems they made
That never have to sleep, dream, or swoon
With any imagination of their own.” Daedalus
Crooned this in the ear of Icarus that afternoon,
That intoxicating, optimistic afternoon.
“That’s my hour of contentment stolen
Without a chance, dance, drug or smug
Sense of moral superiority necessary,
My dizzying vision under a winsome moon.”
Icarus knew his father of invention was a myth
Well suited to swift extinction. Still, he flew.

Rest Stop North of Toquerville, Utah, 26 December 2017

The weather was unusually mild, and I
Was on my way to fetch a child. I stopped
To gather my tattered wits about me
And failed to stop entirely. The off-ramp
Somehow led me back of the parking lot,
Back of beyond, through a turn in junipers
And straight back on to the interstate again.
What could it possibly mean, to have been
So distracted that I kept going smoothly
And arrived at my destination in time?
You know what I want you to infer. The road
Can never be abandoned while we ride it,
And we might as well carry onward as rest.
Maybe. Maybe I just made a witless mistake.
Maybe witlessness and insight are the same,
Not because witlessness is wisdom, but
Because neither is wisdom. The same.
Although there are no equivalencies, actually,
And all seeming samenesses are off-ramps
Through the back of beyond and straight
Back onto the freeway again. In the event,
The weather up north was grim by the time
We returned, but the child and I were grinning
And the house was warmly lit when we walked in.

Living the Good Afterlife, Christmas 2017

Sun lit the high gables of the neighbors,
The snow on their shingles glowing gold.
Memory sat on a couch on the edge
Of an abyss excavated in less than a decade.
Experience did its level best to convince me
Nothing in that experience was real, or if
It were real, it was not a reality that cared
To reveal what was really going on with it.
Now, why would experience contradict itself
Like that, why would experience try to tell me
That? To accept the argument for illusion
Is to implicitly accept both the distinction
Between the illusory and the real, as well
The notion that the real is greater, beyond.
If it were all illusion, then the label mattered
Not in the slightest, so why bother
With the pejorative? I suspected what I sensed
Amounted more to multiple hints in the form
Of discrepancies, hints of something neither
More nor less real or illusory, but other than,
An extension beyond experience, at least
As experienced so far, to far different senses
Of experience nonetheless rooted or linked
In this, this seeming illusory, seeming unreal.
Incompleteness is not necessarily trickery,
And this cosmos is nothing if not incomplete.
It’s not as if the dead know they’re gone, nor
As if the living know for certain they’re not.

Behind Time, 24 December 2017

A thought practiced watching from wings
As things pranced into the light and bowed.
Ideas were ever the unacknowledged stage
Managers of the theater’s awareness. Snow
That looked convincingly fluffy and cold
Dumped from above the gliding curtains.
Back of the sifted snow, a three-walled barn
Faced its open side toward the footlights.
That was the idea. An overflowing trough
Of hay, a swaddled human baby on top,
A young woman in blue and white robes
Bending over the baby, a bearded man
In duller robes beside her. Three grandees
Off to one side, glittering, bearing gifts
The way ambassadors approach a throne,
A few barn animals, cows and goats, no pigs,
And a cluster of shepherds plus a few sheep
Arranged themselves so that all could be
Seen. That was the idea. Make it all seem
Artfully, or at least deliberately staged.
You can’t have a play without an author,
Players, props, at least a few gestures, but
Don’t overthink it. Perish the thought.
What was left was habit, costumes, lights,
The figures glowing in the lights, curtains.
Awareness dimmed, but another thought
In the darkness behind brought up the lights.

Blue Rose Snow, 23 December 2017

When you bothered to consider your past
Consisted of the past that was present
And the past that by passing was never,
Did you also consider how the former
Served as its own fetch? The doppelgängers
Were everything all the time everywhere.
Did you also consider that when you went
To bed in the same bed as previously,
In the same room, same house, same town,
Same landscape under the same sun
That none of those sames was the same,
That there was nothing ever identical
To anything in anyone’s past under the sun,
Including the sun? Did you also consider
That what made each moment fetching
Was the past that was lost, that was never?
The snow that fell around the house tonight
Was as naturally blue as a rose in the moon.

Where Idaho Begins, 22 December 2017

The car crossed another invisible boundary.
You may call all boundaries arbitrary. Indeed
They are if they’re named, if they’re drawn
On the air, if they’re distinguished from all
The imagined unbounded spacetime around,
On either side of each all-important, invented
Line. But consider that there were never
Any anywheres weren’t in fact wall-to-wall
Unbroken expanses of infinitesimally thin,
Impenetrably densely packed boundaries. Try
To divide the arbitrary itself from the given.
Try to defend that boundary confidently.
There is no actual discontinuity at any time
And if there were, that would be the end,
And yet there is only discontinuity anywhere.
The car was in Utah and then in Idaho.
The car moved through the moving air,
Continuously auto-generating its discontinuity
Everywhere. There was a fine shawl of snow
On the dusty green slopes. There were banks
Of old memories from many earlier passes
Through what could only have been, no longer,
Through what could only be the almost here.
There was no stopping, no stopping
The seamlessly becoming other pasts made
Presents as pasts becoming absent there.
Ravens picked at the occasional carcass
Of a passing, pasturing, long past deer.
The car pulled into a rest stop and the rush
Of the wind around it was the sound
Of carrying on without it as it rusted there.
“Welcome to Malad, Where Idaho Begins!”
Read the slowly fading, peeling billboard
For Malad City, named for a passing malady
Among those murderous trappers, the mountain
Men once passed through canyons almost here.
You can’t answer this, my cosmic physicist.
How is it there is always difference in the stillest,
Smallest voice of a momentary indifference?
Only one word, the absurdist cleave, can,
Meaning simultaneously to and away, begin
To indicate how that day devoured a trace of car
In passing that, in passing, devoured the very day.

The Impossible Together, 21 December 2017

Eighty years ago, rural E.B. White imagined
The weirdness of a future world in which
The head of a man who was in New York
Would appear to be talking to you from a box
On your farmhouse parlor floor. Born to that
World, before I turned thirty I added
The oddity of sitting to type glowing messages
To persons then responding in real time,
Whatever real time might be, from the literal
Other side of the world, say, New Zealand,
Instantaneous communication between
Their past and my future a day ahead of me.
By now, in this even newer past, those days are
Nothing, too, are quaint as E.B. White’s dread
Fascination with the coming world of TV.
This afternoon for an hour, whatever an hour
Might mean, body and daughter smiled
And made faces at each other, miles
And miles and hundreds of miles hence,
Discussing a game daughter was playing
At the same annihilated instant on a third screen.
I’ll tell you a secret, E.B. There is no dislocation.
There never was any location in the first place,
And it’s the science of the fiction that breaks
Down the old solid dream. Here we were always be.

The Snow Before the Solstice, 20 December 2017

“Someone else’s thoughts about what you are,
Or should be, can drive you to acts of madness,”
Hilton Als wrote recently. Your own thoughts,
Said I, or something rather like me or inside
Of me, about who you should or might yet be,
Can do the same as easily. I watched a man
Perform his own small act of madness
This evening as I sat by the Christmas Tree,
Meditating on the snow beginning to accumulate
Outside of the window in front of me, me,
Still here after my own acts of madness,
Having failed at almost everything, even to decrease
The surplus population. This man emerged,
Shirtless and potbellied, from his door
Across the street, and walked into the snow.
I sat there, eyeing him through the ornaments
As he stood out there, half bare, snowy,
Not really eyeing anything. I wondered what
He thought he was doing, what scene played
In his head as he surveyed the evening street.
I had the feeling he was me, or as I should be,
Or still might be, oblivious idiot, coming out
To see a world for which he never prepared
And never needed to see. But that’s just me.

Repetition, 19 December 2017

Nothing came back whole; nothing was lost
Entirely. The cosmos whittled and whittled
Away. Day after day, a cat came back, a ghost
Of a large, thickly furred, sealpoint Siamese
That would wander up the drive, sniff under
The cars parked in back, examine the edge
Of the shed, and then vanish. The same cat?
No, yes, no. Nothing is the exact same thing,
Day after day. But the cat was continuous
With its earlier incarnations, grant us that.
Or refuse. The cat vanished away, a new cat
Came in its place, looking much the same,
Each next day. I watched from the window
That it was my own repetitive habit to visit,
While I worked on my daily reworking of words,
And it occurred to me, as this day’s cat
Vanished into old snow, that I was the new cat
And tomorrow another new cat in my place.

A Christmas Card, Salt Lake City, 18 December 2017

Joy. This one was simple. It slipped through
The old-fashioned brass mail slot in the wall.
Four happy selfie faces. No one I knew.
Was a time when it was a great obligation
And maybe a bit of fun, making or selecting
The cards, alone or with a partner, deciding
Which variants should go to which relatives,
Which distal kin or acquaintances to include,
The evening or two spent at a kitchen table,
Thumbing through the old address book,
Licking stamps, scrawling greetings, pausing
Over how much, how personal a message
To send, then waiting to count coup, to hang
The arriving cards over whatever passed
For a hearth, watching for any surprises
That might require a quick scramble to send
A card in return, in time. The last time
Was the Christmas after the last pregnancy
Had ended, the last try, when the wife
Who would be gone to the world and herself
Had herself less than three years to live.
That last time the cards went out with notes
Explaining and apologizing for the lack
Of festivities that year. By the next year,
Who cared? None were sent and few arrived.
New technologies and social media
Were killing the tradition anyway. New life,
As it will, eventually arrived, and by then
Things were handled differently. That, too,
Went by the by. Now was a frosty night,
After worlds and worlds beside, back beside
The receding lake, and no greetings expected,
But here were these faces, this unknown family
Of four slipping smiles through the wall, and
Later came a call from living daughter. Joy.

Cedar City, Utah, 17 December 2017

Our skulls are homes, nests, caves, and blinds
In which we often try to hide from the terrors
Of the truth outside. After having to drop
Daughter off at a corner coffee shop because
People make claims on one another, I left
Cedar City for the Great Salt Lake, three hours
And change north into the spreading night,
And all the way up I-15 I played the songs
That moved me most and loudly sang along,
Imagining an audience listening, a fantasy
More absurd than the one of winning a lottery,
But a temporary refusal of the real, capable
Of comforting me. And when will I sing again
With daughter in the car again? My skull
Is a conveyance for the collision of the worlds
And there is no inner haven in it, no outer
Real beyond it, for it, only the confusion
Of the singing that created enough light, just
Just enough to throw the shadows in the cavern.

Nutcracker, Capitol Theatre, 16 December 2017

Ritual came before art, probably before us
As a species, given the ritual behaviors
Of some others. And ritual has remained
More powerful than art, whenever the two
Tangle. This ballet, for instance, is ritual
No matter how rooted in art. Christmas
Coughs it up again and again, like the songs
And everything else entrained in that wake,
From holiday lights to Handel’s Messiah.
There’s an undertow to ritual that drowns
The heart, and like any other undertow
It rolls in the beauty of land’s ends. Art
Pulled out to fathom five, pearls that were
Its eyes. Deep as doom and as luscious,
The ritual reenactment of the wondertale,
The dream story about living toys, fairies,
And that all-too human cruelty, invention,
Played out on a handsome stage again,
Under the massive chandelier to a crowd
Dressed up as they would not bother to
For even temple, church, or Broadway.
There was applause for every pirouette
And initiates, the children like my daughter,
Exchanged bemused whispers with parents,
Grandparents, and guardians. My favorite
Tendency of rituals held true—innocuous
Execution (how funny the mouse king, dying,
How brisk the Cossacks and the dragon)
Of a nonsense narrative rooted in terror.
Well, why not? Is there a better way of life
Than to live and dance as if the facts
Supported a benign understanding of death?
Good Clara, who sits politely, night after night
Through the exhausting repertoire of dances,
Never really getting her turn, embodies art,
The observer. You want art the creator,
The genius, I know. But it’s not like that.
The story may start as art. Art may dream
The fantasy. But ritual compels attention.
After the performance, in the lobby, daughter
Examined the varieties of finery and spotted
Dancers returning to life in their street clothes,
Distinguished by ritual bouquets of flowers,
Hair up in buns, and long, lissome bodies.
But I know she felt the art as well, I know
She understood, because she told me
That it would be better if Clara had something
To do. Good girl. Good observation. It’s true.

Hogle Zoo Lights, 15 December 2017

A bearded man on a senior discount
Being pushed in a rented wheelchair
By another bearded senior accompanied
Two small children, cousins, boy and girl,
As they raced through the zoo after dark,
Open this night to display Christmas lights.
The cousins delighted in the lights, the ice
From old snow, good for wicked snowballs,
The parkour possibilities of scrambling up
And jumping from boulders and sculptures.
Most of the animals were invisible—in bed,
Stowed away in warmer interiors, or about
But in the dark. The paths teemed anyway
With visitors here for the display of lights,
And those visitors checked the enclosures
Anyway, for any creatures that might be out:
African lions pacing in the Utah cold,
California sea lions yawning, the bald eagles
Perched at rest, a peacock’s black silhouette.
What was the exact measure of entropy here,
All those creatures evolved over epochs
Blended together here, all those creatures
Carefully extracted, kept separate, well fed,
And mated here?  The man in the wheelchair
Considered the brief peculiarity of any zoo
As a biocultural ecosystem. The cousins
Raced each other, enclosure to enclosure.
The old man pushing the wheelchair joked
That the most attractive light in the place
Was the glowing exit sign. A lioness roared.
The peacock shrieked abruptly. On a pillar
In a dark, interior pen, a colobus monkey slept.
Someday, I’ll wager, thought the senior
In the wheelchair, I’ll begin to forget
Strange but ordinary events like this one,
The candied lights against the darkness
In the pens where the incompatibles were kept,
Someday soon, soon and yet not yet.

Poplars, Cottonwoods, and Palms in Immortality, Arizona, 14 December 2017

They’re out there, swaying in the wind
Beside the braided silver of the Virgin River,
Which means only that they were in my head
At some point during my enduring living,
Like Stevens’ windy citherns were in his,
Once, reduced to one on the edge of space
Near the end of him. Mine stand at the edge
Of nothing, really, maybe time, but so stands
Everything always

                         At the cutting edge of change,
Always change, itself everything on the edge
Of nothing. The cottonwoods there are gold
Into mid-December, when holiday greetings
Get exchanged by golfers under talkative palms.
The poplars shelter small birds that burst out
And dart back in again, cheeping and competing,
All year. If you walked in from the river banks,
Through the gold cottonwoods, over the greens,
Down the avenue of poplars and under the palms,
You could duck into a dark room of tourist kitsch
With a long, polished cherrywood bar
On the left and golf clubs to rent on the right.
In the center, at the back, you could find
The closest human approach to the meaning
Or at least the true sense of the universe
At a glass counter where you could pay to play
Numbers carefully constrained and random.
Someday, somewhere somebody will win,
But until then we we're all equally likely to lose,
While the wind moves briskly in the branches.

Poem Right Out of the Box, 13 December 2017

The outer world trembled and the inner
World delighted. The words without the tune
Had never any feathers, but they sang, too,
And were the makers of the song they sang,
And of the little bird, and of the strangest,
Tragic-gestured sea, and of the chilly she
Who seemed to be the owner of their voice.
Understand, the next began not with tunes
But with the naming of the expectation
That any tune was a pattern that could
Continue, spero, sparrow. Naming names
First called the tune containing all tomorrow.
Then the outer world trembled and the words
Therefore declared their independence, or
If not independence (as they still needed
You and needed me, even being themselves
You and being themselves me), their potency
Over the nature of things, all unnamed things
Not actually existing, after all, not yet as things.
The outer world trembled when Jack jumped
Out of the box and said, you may believe
In a future because you can speak, because
Speech gave you belief and belief depended
On a confidence that something would always be
Happening. Did I startle you? Only because
I, language, existed to prepare you, to shape
You, to warn you something must come true,
Something new. Only because you knew.

Inversion Fog, 12 December 2017

Memories are terrifying, the lonely ones

Especially. In the movies, when one begins

To remember, often as not the ominous 

Music comes on, as it should. Memories

Can never be trusted or shared, but we fade

To nothing without them. They’re the angels

We all talk about, trumpeters and fallen,

Spirits athwart our paths in the night,

Messengers telling us who we should serve,

What we’ve done wrong, what will become

Of us, of the world beyond us, who we are.

They wrestle us, disable us, rename us.

They descend invisibly to stand on pins.

They cling like rimes of frost to every twig.

I stood in the thick, milky swirl of an ice fog

Tonight, one that draped the spindly trees

And carpeted a half-empty parking lot

Outside the emptier cinema of ghostly lights, 

Blurring reds and oranges through white

Haze, and I recalled similar solitary winter

Inversions fifteen, twenty, thirty years ago,

Each one an unhealthy haunting I half-liked,

In Salt Lake and Missoula and elsewhere,

In these bowl-shaped valleys where cold air,

Wood smoke, car exhaust, and recollections

Collect and settle. Jeder Erinnerung ist shrecklich.

Holiday Lights, Salt Lake City, 11 December 2017

Top blinds open a crack, at dawn two lights
Along the gutter, one orange, one blue,
Could be seen still glowing in the cold haze.
An unfair approximation of a man lay in bed
And blinked at the apparition. It was too late
To lead another life, but then it always was,
Even at the moment of birth. So this was it,
The being that was the sum total of being.
There was a time when traveling circuses
Would bring to small towns a sideshow tent
That featured something amazing, electric
Lights. Rubes would enter the darkened tent
And gasp in awe when the day turned on.
It wasn’t long, of course, before all that was done,
Once every farmhouse kitchen and bath
Had a little sun. Then more light and more.
The bulbs themselves are changing now.
We adapted to our inventions. Our inventions
Adapted themselves. One morning we will
Wake up and say, this is the only life there is,
This is the only life we know, under our endless
Haze, embraced in our permanent glow.

Necessary, Utah, 10 December 2017

If there were a necessary truth in any story
Directed by David Lynch, it had to have been
The inevitable humming of machines. And you,
If you sat in the quietest luxury hotel room,
You’d have heard, if you cared, a constant hum.
Hospitals and airplane cabins went without saying.
So did cities, suburbs, the insides of automobiles,
The railroad intersections clicking at night,
The vast grain silos humming on the plains.
But even in what remained as designated
Wilderness (meaning it was not wilderness),
If you’d slept out under the stars as often
As I’d done, you should have noticed the hum
Of the jets that almost never abandon the sky.
As a guest in a modest house in the foothills
Of a sternly massive mountain range, I heard
The hum of local machines incessantly, I listened,
From dawn to the next dawn, to the refrigerator
And the furnace coming on, the faint thrum
Of all the wiring, the plumbing, the passing
Cars and trucks outside, the freight trains
Mourning through the unseen canyons beyond.
I was not bothered, not so bothered as some.
The machines as they functioned reminded me
What a fine-tooled work of art humanity had become,
What an ornament Earth had bodied forth
From her continually spinning, slowly slowing,
Ever faintly humming dynamo of lives.
If there were a necessary truth in any story
It would had to have been something hummed.

Welcome, Stranger, 9 December 2017

There were waves that were things or waves
That only were in things, and I found more
Mystery in the latter. A sheet of light,
A radiating shimmer from a source was weird
In the earlier sense, spooky and powerful,
But the wave that had no existence except
As a passing distortion, a compression
And an expansion of the relationships
Among phenomena that were never waves,
Moved beyond weirdness, however normal
The experience of it was—old mossy pond
Splash, the pulse of your slow whisper
In my sobbing ear, the rustling of papers
In a room empty of souls, the contraction
And expansion of the local space-time curve
By an event so great and so ancient
A million million worlds as detailed as ours,
Every last life since the dawn of life included,
Every event, every dimension, every memory
A million million times collapsed—to stranger.

Fifteenth and Fifteenth, 8 December 2017

Daughter turned a year of weeks on Friday,
A year of Mondays, Tuesdays, Sundays.
Three hundred and sixty five Saturdays
All in what was only an opening act of a life.
Oh, god, you had no idea when you created
This world that would have to create you
You were involving yourself in quantifiable
Longing and loneliness, or did you? Count
The days a human wakes to being human
And consider how divinity had to wait
On a few tens of thousands of years, a few
Hundreds at least of generations to be born.
Body sat down at a cafe in Salt Lake City
A month to the day after failing at dying
And thought, here we are, us and our ideas
Of how this universe works or should maybe
And somewhere a child of ours is figuring
What best to ask for a seventh birthday gift.

Clear Light, Utah, 7 December 2017

You didn’t have to start the day believing
It would go well. You didn’t have to start
Believing anything. You managed to get up.
You managed make a bed, eat breakfast,
Clean up. You were numbered among
The fortunates in having a bed to wake from.
You had not always been so fortunate.
You might not always be so fortunate.
When you stood out on the driveway,
Surrounded by the homes of other humans
And early winter bones of backyard aspens,
You noticed that the clear light felt good
On your shoulders and neck. There was a lot
To be said for being dead, but one thing
There was not: only the returned to living
Could savor any pleasure. So you savored.
You made no mistake about it. You knew
Every little dangerous pain in every joint,
Every bit of wreckage you had to cart
Through your off and on and on awareness,
The moral, mental, biological morass
Of missed connections and bent intentions,
You knew as well as anyone the price
Of living’s dying every day, but you accepted
The pleasure of the cold light warming
Your back, and you said in all fairness,
This is a fine, fine day. You, you dead man,
You said it, how small a claim, and so it was.
Although the world you make each moment
Is too real for your control, you have some
Clear light you can claim within it. So. So. So.

Tabletop Metabolism, Salt Lake City, Utah, 6 December 2017

A homely succulent two hands high
Whose taxonym I didn’t know, glowed
With excess light waves redirecting
From the surfaces of its glossy, waxy leaves.
Nothing could be much less extraordinary
Than an ugly houseplant in an old pot
On a side table cluttered with dead leaves.
But what a machine. There it sat, motionless
To my human eyes, but alive, seething
With photosynthesis, primed for defense
Against parasites, herbivores, dehydration,
And other maladies its ancestors survived.
And what a human thing to have done,
To have excerpted one plant from a system,
To have cultivated, transported, displayed,
And marketed it, to have bought it for cash
And repotted it, to have set it by a window,
A double-paned marvel of industrial design,
To have watered it diligently, to have sat
And stared at it, to have written this about it.
It wasn’t a plant alone or only but an orrery,
A table-top wonder, the tip of the carbon
Pencil inscribing a message about the world
From the world, back to the world no longer
Even attending to its own mail, questioning,
Always questioning the source. It was
That difference between the dancer
And the dance that supposedly could not be
Calculated, the denouement tying it all up,
A damn houseplant in a low sun in a city
At the edge of a poisonous lake left behind
When the great inland ocean that used to be
Here shrank. I imagined my ugly succulent
As a small underwater something floating
In the light of tens of thousands of winters
Gone, just under the surface near the shore.
All the changes demonstrated only changes
Make no actual difference. Ordinary remains
Ordinary—tabletop, wilderness, life, world.

Interstate Exchange, 5 December 2017

I was only local traffic.
I clogged my lane awhile and left.
There had been a few times I’d been
A long-distance trajectory
With no destined destination,
Lonesome liar, midnight rider,
A rambling, gambling backslider,
But god a’mighty cut me down.

Now I went to meet a lawyer,
Then I headed home for dinner.
If you’d asked me about either,
I’d have said I deserved neither.
A man on the exit corner,
Young and bearded, held up a sign,
Begging for help for his hunger.
Curse me, I gave him two dollars.

Auto Shop, Salt Lake, 4 December 2017

A family business on a busy corner, proud
To serve us all “since 1955,” three bays,
Two pumps out front, an office with chairs,
Plastic countertop Christmas tree, no begonia,
It looks cleaner than Elizabeth described it,
Although it still reeks of oil. Maybe someone
Had hurt feelings about her depiction of dirt
And tried to make an effort, scrub it up a bit.
Prints of hot rods on the Bonneville Salt Flats
Decorate most of the available wall. No one
Lives here now, for sure, but a grandson, or
More plausibly a great grandson, bearing
An eye-catching resemblance to the original
Whose ‘50s picture hangs above the register
While sporting the same damn razor haircut,
Rings up customers here to get registered
And inspected, or to get their oil changed,
Or their alternator fixed. These customers,
Their glossy black bricks of smart phones,
Their Escalades, Priuses, and Navigators,
All suggest recent twenty-first century U.S.,
But otherwise this shop is a nostalgia box.
Letting my eyes rummage around in it, I’m
Nostalgic, not for old auto shops or hot rods
Or grease monkeys or razor cuts, all props,
But for that first time I opened her book,
Twentieth century still nearly a quart short,
Or at least a fifth, the condescending poet
Herself already just recently dead, and found
It was possible to mock a little, to look down
A little on the saucy world of greasy men,
To note in a prissy way an ugly grey crochet,
And still to be in love with a scene. I knew
Right away, having come from men like them
Myself, who loved us wasn’t someone hiding
Outside of the poem, as the poet suggested.
It was the poet who softly said so loved us all.

Limbo, Utah, 3 December 2017

For a small while snow flew by outside
And while I watched, I realized how easy
It is for me, now that I’m dead, to cry.
Almost anything can make me tear up,
From the thought of my distanced child
To the sound of wind dying on the windows.
We dead who live are not, are not
The same as those who sleep, are not
The same as those we used to be, are not
The resurrected, are more like refugees.
When the snow stopped falling, it was gone
And there was only moonlight on the lawn.

Television Room, 2 December 2017

The devices all switched off, the sunlight
Through the white blinds was the only show.
How was it change occurred when change
Always subdivided into smaller changes?
From what did anything change that wasn’t
Itself illusion, no more than other changes?
When I looked up the light was different.
Body breathed and struggled to heal. Mind
Circled within the body’s chemistry, waves
Like any waves, shaped by the interactions
Of the properties of the medium they rippled
With the properties of whatever constrained
Them, as patterns in a lake would tell you
Something about water, something about
The cup of stone and earth containing it,
And something about the wind. Likewise,
For mind the properties of synapses, pulses,
Bone, blood, and external events were
Mysteries, visible or invisible, and only
The resultant patterns were easily traced.
Light waves rose and fell from shelves
And carpets, a few carrying information back
Out windows through which they’d entered
To tell the bright December afternoon, yes,
Mind and body hunched in those shadows
Among furnishings and switched-off devices
Thinking hard and circularly about change.

Close to Motionless, Utah, 1 December 2017

Ribs pulled apart by convulsive coughing,
The rest of body ached too much to move
More than minimally. Bed to chair to sofa.
The day was the same for this invalid
As it was for those active—locally sunny,
Mild, another dry day for the almanac. A day.
The world does not, in fact, coordinate.
We wait on coincidences to give us
The synchronicities that give us confidence,
But those coincidences are cons. So the day,
It went one way through the sky but various
Ways through the streets and houses,
Humans, stray cats, rodents, and viruses
Like those bugs building great civilizations
In body’s throat and lungs. Body waited
Impatiently for civilization’s inevitable collapse.
In the meantime everything kept changing,
While very little seemed to move. The world
Does not coordinate, but oh it carves deep grooves.

Garden Shed, Utah, 30 November 2017

No one lived in it. No one was in there today.
Hardly what you’d call a remote location,
Stuck at the end of an ordinary driveway
In a closely packed neighborhood, once
An early suburb, since overtaken by the city.
But it was isolated, all the same, because
No one bothered to visit it but an alley cat,
And even the cat only sniffed and went on.
Watching from a window of an empty home
Not belonging in any sense to me, daughter
Hundreds of miles and weeks away from me,
I thought I detected the faint movement
Of my soul through that windowless wall
At the end of the drive, past where the cat
Had gone, perhaps into the mountain snow.

Small Circles, Salt Lake City, 29 November 2017

The falcon closed in on a hole at the center
Of the world. The Great Salt Lake drained
Into what remained of the Great Salt Lake.
Nothing fell apart. Nothing failed to hold.
A vortex underneath the sunset puckered.
At a table in a breakfast room lit by dying
Daylight, an oddly shaped individual bent
Over a flickering screen and typed, seeking
Out a key to the tourniquet twisted around
His chest. He wasn’t trying to get away.
He was trying to discover why the worst
Had not convicted him. Best he could say,
A kind of ecosystem near the bottom made
A green dream of exhaustion in the shade.

Empty House, 28 November 2017

For a few hours, the house got on by itself.
Light shifted across chairs and floors,
The fundamental machines functioned,
Heater, refrigerator, etc. The world did not
Collapse. The little lump of humanity
That sat at the table, filing applications
For teaching jobs and healthcare, smiled.
Even sick, down with a bug, even decayed,
Broke, and broken, it was pleasant to be,
Literally, momentarily pleasant just to be.
There was more he could be doing, there
Was less expectation left than ever before,
But when the universe looked the other way,
It felt almost safe to dream in the monster’s fur.

The Sickroom, 27 November 2017

Peach lights in the clouds at dawn and then
A resolutely grey day settled in. The body
On the bed could hardly stir, as if that were
Any excuse in this world. Life is motion, ohoy,
The marriage of flesh and air. This flesh
Had married despair, a bad romantic choice,
But oh well. Mind imagined the body from above,
A discombobulated lump under rumpled covers,
Sweating, shivering, and feverish, a scruffy head
Poking out an old and bulbous nose. It’s hard,
Mind thought to self, to vote in favor of such
A body as this one, crooked and broken,
Careless and barely healed, underpowered,
Overweight, and getting quickly just plain
Old and grey. On top of which, it’s sick today.
But body hadn’t gotten this far by paying
Any mind to mind. Body, slug that it was,
Was the only one who had dragged the whole
Mess out of the icy water and across the frozen mud.
Body was therefore, however pained, unimpressed
By any advice suggesting it should end
Its misery under duress. The grey day alone
Couldn’t keep the flesh, coughing, sagging,
Shivering, heavy from dragging out of bed.
Here we are, someone laughed, and this,
This is what it's like, to live life after you’re dead!

The Forest, 26 November 2017

Before she left for far away, daughter sat herself
On the couch beside me and began to play
With two small, hand carved and painted
Wooden figurines, belonging to her grandma,
One of which was a sly old woman in a kerchief,
Cutting her eyes sideways, the other a sly old man
In a flat cap doing just the same. Pretty soon,
We were enmeshed in daughter’s narrative,
She and I, about a grandmother going to visit
Her twin granddaughters on the other side
Of a deep forest in which she planned to camp
Two nights on the way. The old man was
A sea captain who had grown up in the forest
As the son of a woodsman and who offered
To help the old woman on the dangerous path.
Across the couch and through the woods
They walked. When they stopped for the night,
The old woman pitched her tent while the old man
Built a fire, cut a switch from a low-hanging branch,
Pulled some twine from his pocket, borrowed
A pin from the old woman that he bent
Into a fishhook, and went to a waterfall to catch dinner.
That evening they, improbably,
Ate fresh-caught salmon with mushrooms and berries
The old woman had gathered, and when
It was dark and time to sleep the old man
Offered to sleep on the ground outside, but
The old woman showed him the bed she’d made
Inside the tent and invited him in. The second day
Went uneventfully much the same, although
This time the old woman did the fishing
And they more plausibly dined on trout.
The third day they reached the house at the far edge
Of the forest, where the old woman’s tall twin
Granddaughters with lustrous black hair
And Thai dancing costumes (they’re adopted)
Invited her and her new friend in. They gave
The old man a tour of their stucco mansion
And then performed a welcoming dance for him.
Then it was time to leave. Daughter left the figurines
Sprawled akimbo, hugged her father fiercely
And whispered to him, for his ears only, “That’s
The way it was and that’s the way it should have been!”

Singing with Offspring, 25 November 2017

We took turns, one inventing a scat pattern,
The other improvising melody and lyrics
Over it and then rejoining it, time to time,
Before concluding it. Rhythmic silliness,
The synchronized nonsense vocalizations
Of parent and child, about as unalloyed
As joy gets. Grandparents bore witness.
The house walls sheltered and absorbed us.
A mournful freight train reminded us there was
An active, rhythmic night outside of this,
This spontaneous life that’s best and happiest,
Because happiness must be temporary
And therefore any rhythm lacking innovation
Is prisonous and dangerous. Adjust. Adjust.

Zamani, 24 November 2017

Long time ago, after the ghosts had gone
For good, the lack of resurrection was
The beginning of forgiveness. It’s not true
That anyone could separate forgive and forget.
The one presupposed the other, in humans
Anyway. Bones excavated in Eastern Europe
That had nothing to do with remembered
Atrocities or historical wars, bones that were
Five thousand years old at least, bore traces
Of the Plague, suggesting that the nomads
Who shouldered in off the steppes cleared
Demographic meadows for their descendants
With the mindless aid of the very same miseries
That had driven them away from home
In the first place, the same murderous pests,
A prequel in a sense to the smallpox blankets
And the waves of parasitic decimation
Much later Europeans would unleash
In the Americas to devastating effect. But who
Curses those bones for curses they carried?
It’s like that. There are actually many stages,
And dying from living memory is just the first,
In a species that keeps grievance records.
There’s the passing away of history, which
Can take hundreds of years before beginning
To exhaust itself and fade into amoral anecdote
After a millennium or two. There’s the passing
Of ethnies, religions, and languages, which
Dissolve the bonds of resentment as they sink.
There’s the passing of prehistory, and then,
Earlier, of the other, competing subspecies, which
Had made it harder to feel lonely while they were
Still remembered, a gap that remains a depression
In the hollows of many folk stories concerning
Lost races of little people, trolls and such,
Mostly caught under the ground. Out and out,
Further and further towards no memory at all,
Not even false, and then it’s nothing but
Forgiveness and speculations about beginnings
Near the end. Significance recedes asymptotically
And, along with it, pride and blame. Zamani. The same.

Crowded Restaurant, Salt Lake City, Thanksgiving 2017

Affinal relatives were everywhere, all kinds
Of fictive kin. Belonging was a metaphor
With overlapping layers we all nestled in.
Forgive me, incapable of almost anything,
For thinking you might want me to explain.
The metaphor of the individual in the single
Body, the identity relation, patrolled
By proprioception, was one place to begin,
And then the father and daughter pairing,
Granddaughter and maternal grandmother,
Grandmother and her husband, beginning
To stretch thin the biological metaphor
Of generational descent, the other tables
With their own arrangements of family
And friends, the occasional acquaintances
Temporarily holiday-adopted in, beyond them
The whole restaurant, a system of roles
And functions, a team, locally well known
For pies, especially at Thanksgiving, when
Literally tens of thousands of them were sold
From this location in the course of one long
Weekend, the pies themselves becoming
A tradition, a kind of identification, organized
And sold from tents outside, long lines
In the parking lot, itself a part of a system
Of boundaries, outside and in, also the city,
A thing to belong to, also the Beehive State,
The hegemonic nation state, the state
Of being in this era of technology, the state
Of being human, caring about belonging,
Comforted by caring, caring about these things.

One Man Band Diner, Nephi, Utah, 22 November 2017

It took me a while to figure out the concept,

The red phones for orders at each booth,

The red lights telling you it was time

To fetch your order for yourself, the register

At the end of the grill. The thing was meant

Literally for a single person to run the show,

And one did, taking orders while cooking,

Stepping sideways to ring up a customer.

Little place starred with old publicity stills

Of Audrey Hepburn, James Dean, Frank

Sinatra, Marilyn Monroe. Nostalgia in a town

Named for a figure in the Book of Mormon

Under a massive pyramid of a mountain

Named for a place in the same book.

The layers and layers of human naming,

Human signifying, human gambling on what

Other humans will pay, a thick honey baklava

Of creativity compiled from the simple need

To eat, survive, and breed. Nothing simple

About it. For the thousandth time and more,

I caught myself, a deadbeat near the end 

Of greed, contemplating what it was taught

The ancestors to try to really speak. What

Cost dropped to trigger the benefit, what

Benefit rose above the cost to cause this

Thing of ours, alone among the beasts, 

To get so carried away by communication 

As a means to cumulative invention? What

Tipped the balance in favor of this strategy,

Removed the blocks from under the wheels

Of what became our runaway train? We eat,

As I ate, according to the opportunities 

Our own species metes, not merely 

According to the availability of any given

External niche. The one man band nodded

At the vintage jukebox as he flipped meats,

And someone shoved in quarters, delighted

At how quaint the setting and the machine,

And out poured the recorded and long-gone 

Deceased voice of John Lennon, screeching

Hoarsely at the end of a midnight session

More than half a century ago on an island

The other side of the world from here, 

“Shake it up, baby, now! Twist and shout!

C’mon, c’mon baby now! Come on and work

It on out!” I knew right then, as the pink sun

Set over the desert, I would never work it out.

Why I’m Never Gone for Long, 21 November 2017

For me, the long reach of memory.
For me, the irreversibility of change.
I stuffed two dozen lined sheets of paper
With chicken scratch, top to bottom
And on both sides, to testify

To the enduring longing for escape
Despite considerable endurance
Under house arrest in reality. There is a door
That can’t be gone through, and that
Has always been the only door for me.

Every time I rush out of the room
And into the darkness without a clue,
I come back because I went through
Something, yes, but not that only door
Not death I was born to hurtle through.

The Cry Concerns No One At All, 20 November 2017

"We make a dwelling in the evening air,

In which being together is enough."

I think of lonely Stevens

Now when I reread the poems.

They always seemed wise to me.

To me, they still seem that wise,

But the haunted man behind

The wisdom, the tall lawyer,

Insurance executive,

Caricature of burgher,

The company man who walked

To work each day and voted

Republican, the cartoon

Of someone so unlike me,

The cardboard cut-out backdrop,

The comical enigma

No longer satisfies me.

I think on the feckless tourist,

Drunken and punched in Key West,

The incompetent husband

Who never took a lover,

The father of one daughter.

He tortured reality

And the imagination,

Cranking that hurdy-gurdy

So it groaned. He never sang

Of failure, never confessed,

Never got more personal

Than wondering if he'd lived

A skeleton's life, old man

Asleep in two worlds. It made,

He wrote, so little difference,

At so much more than seventy,

That wisdom came from a fool,

Emerged from his foolishness,

Impatient for the grandeur

We need in so much misery,

Finding it in misery,

That afflatus of ruin.

Now when I reread the poems,

I hear a secret proposed,

An unwritten mystery

Propounded: wisdom's the fool.

I'm Not Aiming to Start Preaching, 19 November 2017

I'm going to say it baffles it me.

I'm not coming down on one side

Or the other, but given the cruelty,

The infinite, infinitely inventive

Cruelty humans visit daily on each other,

The small kindnesses fascinate me,

Beguile me, especially among the down

And all but out. I've seen recidivists

In holding cells offer help to frightened souls,

Seen those who not hours ago committed crimes,

Albeit mostly minor, help someone confused

Call bail. I've seen the unsuccessful suicides

Like myself, penned up and medicated

For anxiety, voices, insomnia, paranoia,

Denied shoelaces, phones, and pointy pencils,

Tenderly watch each other's backs, hold doors,

Make room for each other at the group table,

Help the panicked one find a nurse.

What is this that brings us to destroy our lives

And then offer a gentle word, to be spinning

With indifference and despair and the urge to be kind?

Gigantic in Everything But Size, 18 November 2017

There is no more damaging

Admission than being good

At lying. Admit to that

And you'll never be believed

When telling truth again,

No matter what truths you tell.

Any particular lie,

Even a whole pile of them,

Can be forgiven,

But let the truth slip you're good

At lying for its own sake

And all the gods will shudder,

Ulysses, except for one,

Athena of the strange eyes,

As fond of you as disguise.

De Plus en Plus, 17 November 2017

The urge to make a secret

Of what's not real, even if not

Especially important,

Breeds a special kind of lie,

The kind that scrub jays favor,

Busying themselves with false

Caches to keep the real ones

Hidden, the kind that pharaohs

Tried, constructing false chambers,

Hoping to keep grave robbers

Away from the heart

Of their pyramids

And usually failing.

More and more, I find myself,

My true self defined by this

Ostentatious signaling

That here I am burying

Treasure buried somewhere else.

Allowed Items in Acute Inpatient Psychiatry, 16 November 2017

Crutches are too dangerous

For psych ward; here's a wheelchair.

No, no stapled notepads--

What people do with staples!

(Paper cuts okay.)

Toxic emotions

Go without saying.

After all, you're here, aren't you?

Also, non-toxic crayons.

Three books at the most.

More books than that might sustain

A barrage we'd have to duck.

Wedding rings. Bite-sized candies.

Humility and kindness.

Behavioral Access Center, Saint George, Utah, 15 November 2017

1. How Did You Get Here?

Each interview is different.

Everyone wants to help you,

But everyone brings their own

Individual

Blend of background and beliefs,

Fears and personality

To the questions that they ask.

There are those who want to laugh

And like to see you laugh, too.

There are the suspicious ones

Who interrogate for lies,

The soft ones who get teary,

And my favorite, the shepherds

Who want you back in the fold.

There's the one who chides

You for invoking magic,

Then says, "This was meant to be."

2. Workbook

Alone with the evidence-

Based "Wellness Recovery

Action Plan" and forbidden

Access to the internet,

I stared at the words "wellness"

And "well" and wished I recalled

Their full etymology.

Every page of the workbook

Assumed I knew what "well" was.

Other words, words like "trigger"

And "toolbox" and "action plan"

Were glossed, but "wellness"

And "well" never were.

Before I tell when I'm not

Feeling well, or what I'm like

When I'm feeling well,

I'd like to know what I meant.

Good? Cheerful? Benevolent?

Healthy? Contented?

Normal? Competent?

Full of clear water

With a bucket to fetch it?

Just ok? I'm well, thank you?

I thought, I feel well

When, well, I don't feel like hell,

When I'm safely in my shell,

No one knocking, can't you tell?

3. A Nature Poem

What do you think of

In a room without reading

Or viewing materials,

A beige room without a clock

Or a window or a soul?

The chair is comfortable,

The air uniformly warm.

There's no annoying music,

No music of any kind,

No television noises.

Only the printer behind

The nurses' desk hums.

How could you possibly hurt?

I'm going to write a haiku.

4. Lamp Sunrise

A night in a recliner

After seven interviews,

No windows in sight,

Ended with a light

Switched on overhead

By the newest therapist

Arrived for her morning shift.

I'm getting better

At writing with bendy pens

Too soft for self harm.

I miss my daughter--

I miss my freedom--

(The limitations

Of my flesh, I get to keep.

My failures, I get to keep.)

There's nothing to read.

There's food on the way,

Then more interviews.

It's pleasant in a strange way.

But it's not the dawn highway

Where I could pretend

This was my world in the end.

The Good Liar's Breakfast Before the ER, 14 November 2017

It kills me that we blame ourselves
And praise the world that made us,
Kills me that we instruct and punish
Each other to praise the world that made us.
We make our gods and tell each other
All about great gods we made that made us,
Made us in their images, made the world
Just for us, so how could we be less
Than essential and beloved to this world,
This heartbreakingly lovely world that made
And then ignored us, our parentage
Most evident whenever we feel
That we have to abandon or hurt us.
If we can’t be better than what made us,
That doesn’t mean we must be worse.

The Cretan Paradox, Sand Island, 13 November 2017

Epimenides,
Two thousand six hundred years
Before now, wasn’t trying
To create a paradox.

He was chastising
His fellow Cretans
For the heresy
Of saying Zeus was mortal,

That’s all. Just a man angry
At modern impiety,
A type we still have with us.

Oblivious to context,
The apostle Paul
Would quote Epimenides
To chivvy Cretan Christians.

A century or two on,
Clement would quote Paul
Quoting Epimenides,
Writing, Cretans don’t believe

Christianity’s the truth
Because Cretans are liars.
So Zeus wasn’t immortal

After all, ironically.
Maybe Epimenides
Was the liar, and then Paul,

And so on, all those irate
Theists calling out doubters
Of the immortality
Of their historical god.

They’re all millenniums dead
Now, although their words ghost on,
The real gods, hungry whispers.

I’ll write it myself.
I’ll make it airtight.
Everything I write’s a lie.

There, now. Evil beast
With idle belly growling,
I wait here by the dry wash,

Out of resources,
But loath to leave my daughter
And still reluctant to die.

The song says “you have to lose
It all before you can find
Your way.” Your way back? Or out?

There’s no righteousness
Or anger in paradox,
Just the despair of the choice,
Just the despairing of truth.

An Art I Do Exceptionally Ill, Although It Still Feels Like Hell

Hypothermic suicide,

Induced through sitting

In an ice-fringed lake at dawn

Was not the best strategy

For an avid lake swimmer

With a walrus-like figure.

Sunk to my shoulders

Wedged among aspen branches

Fallen in the lake,

So as not to drown

Accidentally

Once securely comatose,

I waited for the promised

Symptoms in sequence,

Shivering, of course,

More and more rapid heart rate,

Failing coordination,

Mental confusion--

And then the good ones--

Apathy, low blood pressure,

Inability to walk,

Followed by coma,

Sometimes preceded

By the weirder traits,

"Paradoxical

Undressing" and "terminal"

Burrowing." But no,

Not for me the chilly death.

My feet ached underwater

Like baby seals being clubbed,

But never went numb.

I never stopped shivering.

My torso shuddered

Uncontrollably

In the grip of the water.

Who knows what damage

I did my vital organs?

I breathed the cold air deeply,

Deeply as I could,

But my heart only thundered

And my one moment

Of confusion occurred when

The moon I had been tracking

As it set in the bare tress

Went missing. Maybe

I could also count

As a derangement

The moment when I let go

Of the wet branches,

Reached for my crutches

Underwater in the silt,

And staggered, up to my neck

Now in the painful water,

Avoiding the shore

Because I knew I would fall

If I walked across those stones.

I labored through muck,

Disturbing a strange creature

That propelled itself

On fin-like legs, leg-like fins,

Or did I imagine it?

Reaching where I'd parked the car

On frozen clays, I hauled out

In immense concentration,

Like a drunkard determined

Not to fall over,

And got to the car,

Shaking and woozy

And reeking with grey pond mud.

When I started the heater

The car informed me

That although the sun was high,

The outside air temperature

Still hovered around freezing

And the car clock read

Two and a half hours later

Than it had when I stepped out

And waded deliberately

Into the water to die.

The sun, then an orange smudge

On the southeast horizon

Was now well above the trees.

I shook another two hours.

It was one whole hour before

I could get out of my clothes

And a half hour to struggle

Into dry clothes from my pack.

Everything hurt the whole day,

But without meaning

To do any such thing, I

Had somehow survived

An entire morning

From dawn to nearly lunch hour

Soaking in wet cold enough

The survival manual

Gave favorable odds

For death in under an hour.

Now what to do with myself?

A wreck with another day

To get through, a cold ruin

With neither needle nor noose

Nor gun. Why I am around

After what I've done?

A White Horse, 7 November 2017

I kept refusing
Opportunities to die.
Good opportunities, too,
Excellent chances.

The bright new penny
Landed face up in the mud.
So did the smooth worn quarter,
Then the dull nickel.

Three times I had asked
Should I come down the mountain?
Should I try another day?

The odds of three heads
The same as three straight
Pregnancies inheriting
A dominant mutation,

Long enough to seem a sign
But not nearly long enough
To be sure of it.

Better to lie here and die
Or live one more day and lie?
A hawk was watching,

As was a white horse.
Conquest? Pestilence?
I went back down the mountain.

Next day, there I was,
Nothing resolved or conquered,
My own mind a pestilence.

But I did greet a sweet dawn
And moonlight as white as that horse.
I got to hug my daughter.

The Reservoir Drained, 6 November 2017

Fifty five trips around the sun held more
Stories than the most gifted storyteller
Could tell, and I was among the least.
Leave no trace, no shallow graves, so go
The slogans of the wilderness visitors,
But none of them really wished to leave
Without a trace. We liked to think we could,
With concentration, make the world
A better place, the way the sea foam wishes
It could leave behind a better wave.
We dreamed we left none but a noble trace.
In any case, I was bound to leave some lines
Behind but hardly any of the kind most of us
Hope to leave or find. And why would I wish
That everyone after me knew I was here
If I’m bound to not know I was here myself?
I remember my lost daughters, lost wife,
Lost parents, siblings, other relatives,
And casually lost acquaintances. They don’t.
They don’t remember me or themselves.
As soon as I’m gone or forget, there will be
No one left to recall the exact appearance
Of my one found daughter’s head crowning
Between her mother’s pinhooked knees.
I know it looked like many other such births,
Like millions, like billions of others. But like
Was never is, is never is, is never the same.
After hours of pushing, her soft skull still
Emerged as a sphere, a theater in the round.
Her eyes were open when I first saw them,
Blue and unfocused, unfinished and being
For the first time something human to see.
I remember so many, many things. Wrong,
Dead wrong, if you say I can’t take them with me.

Ghel Dheu, 5 November 2017

Hope more improbable than magic dogged
Me around, panting as insistently as its buddy
The blues. I rejected the presumption
That we fail when we fail to connect.
If you lie to escape a lie meant to contain you
And destroy you, in what way, tell me, exactly,
Did you, did you die? You can’t not be what
You knew never was at all. The handwriting
Was lying when it sketched across the wall.
Impermanence brings the permanent end.
Everything else is living in ignorance; everything
Is living and ignorance. Nothing is knowing.
Glamorous moon, the name of a ghost,
The hunter high past mid-autumn sky.
Shine little glow worm, glimmer glamour.
I wanted the uncut drug, the overdose
Of the improbable. Why? Because if it comes
To you, statistically pure, the improbable
Validates you, tells you that you had meaning,
The rest of the compulsively lying world be damned.
Thus the dying think to themselves, this may be
The last time I touch this person, see this scene,
But they are wrong, headed as they are
For no time, for never was at all. It’s the longer
Living who will search their memories and say
That, that was the last time we touched the dead.

Lava Point, 4 November 2017

Up at lava pond, a black beaver scampered
And a white horse cantered free of fences.
A woman with heavy dark hair stood there.
Her name is Samsara and sooner or later
She’s going to fix your little red wagon, she is.
Sooner or later, she’s going to settle your hash.
One day when I was seventeen and it was
Spring, blossoms and new mown grass, etc.
In the air, my future as bright as it ever cared
To get, she herself started in on me. I stared
Out of my dormitory window at the green,
And I put my God in a box because I wanted
To love her. I asked Him to do something
For me, which was to speak to me, to answer,
Anything He wanted to say, just so I knew it.
But nothing outside my own head was said.
I tried again, occasionally, and not with God
Or gods only. Here and there, I offered a dare,
An opportunity for something, anything
Supernatural, superhuman, or in any event
Nonhuman, to engage in conversation with me.
You will say I was obtuse and stubborn. I was
And I was, but I was hardly alone in offering
Prayers, making requests, or looking for signs
And omens in coincidences or the heavens.
It’s as human as talking to beg favor of the world,
Which was, in the end, what I came to: pure
Propositions put to the world as a whole,
The planet, the cosmos, the universe, the whole,
Assuming there was a whole and that it knew
Itself as such or some part of it knew and could
Answer for or even if not the rest. Whatever.
Still, the odd things dominated and the hope
For structured responses dimmed. Latterly,
I’d come to be numb enough to ask only
That the numbers, the nonmiraculous odds
Of those meaningless fairies, the numbers
Agree with me when I most desperately
Needed them to agree. That would be
Miracle enough for me. By way of response
I got my own dreams served to me in my head
On a platter, garnished with irrelevant surprises,
A pretty day at altitude in November, a black
Beaver waddling into the rushes, slap of tail
And then gone, a marvelously solitary,
Unsaddled, unbridled white mare in the fields
Of dry grass beside that beaver pond, crossing
The road behind me, then accelerating
Into a trot that looked like a break for freedom
Over the broken fences into the aspens.
Yes, it was all lovely but it was not symbolic,
Not predictive. It answered no prayers,
And still I can see her standing there, face
Hidden in her extravagant dark hair.

Cold Water, Utah, 3 November 2017

All Death’s birthdays passed me by, and then
It was just November. The canyons were still
Gold by the creeks and unseasonably warm
But toothed with shadows all day long, while
Up high, in the aspen plateaus and small ponds,
All was bony white and properly cold but bright.
The rowboat with two men talking and fishing
Felt like a haunting from earlier autumn, as if
The same boat, same men from weeks ago,
Years ago, decades ago, were an apparition
Doomed to float around the lake in all seasons.
I looked longingly at the cold water. To swim,
Even convulsed with shudders, is better
Than to fall. To lie down in minuscule wavelets
Like the scales of a slumbering monster of ice,
To lie down like an incision in the water’s side
And float like sutures on the surface, allowing
The wounded water to slowly close over
And heal—but not while that damn fishing boat
Floats by—that would be better than dying
In the usual hospital bed or accident.
I had heard that it takes a long time to cool
The blood of a pulsing mammal, a long time
To get safely past that mad moment
Of hallucination and leaping about, stripping
To skin. But time is not a quantity to be measured,
Only a measure of what’s lost. I love how cold
Water reflects the least bit of light and shines.

Out of Pocket, Arizona, Dia de los Muertos 2017

I came to the door of disaster like a dog
Looking for a home. Don’t drive me away,
Oh kind one. Don’t refuse me a master.
But I’ve been hanging around the perimeter
Of the apocalypse ever since, never let in,
Begging for scraps of catastrophe, which I get,
I always get. Oh, to be inside the door. Oh,
To not be anymore. Oh to be fed on the bread
Of pure corporeality, of things unaware,
The being of unliving, the breath of the dead.
But not to have to go there, not to cross
The threshold first. That’s a truth about some
Dogs—we whimper at the door, but we are
Too afraid to accept the invitation in.