A Boy Chasing a Ball in Worthen Park, Utah, 31 January 2017

I read of a competitive lumberjack who said,
Of a fall from a tree, "The only way I knew I wasn’t dead
Was when I heard a lady in the audience yell, ‘I think he’s dead.’"
Recent mornings, sometimes, I first realized I was still alive myself
When an unlocatable voice in my head uttered some similar cry.
Then there they were, in the clear dark, the usual bright stars,
Offering their usual absence of commentary on our lives.
Thus things continued, typical rituals typically executed, which meant
No execution yet. Bizarrely over-confident and cheerful,
Body's innate response to a fine day in the sun couldn't be
Overcome. I had no good idea how many times beforehand
I had sat in the same position, more or less, more or less
The same body, in the same little city's same park, more or less,
Eating my lunch and thinking this world might yet turn out to be
Something I could seize, as if a dreamy nonsense quest could go on
All day and night, no fall at all. It could you know, and it just might.

Cedar Pocket, Arizona, 30 January 2017

There was a big, black rabbit on its hind legs, forepaws up

By the abandoned farmyard in Hurricane this morning,

A big, black rabbit that turned out to be a charred tree stump.

There was a card gone missing from the Italian tarot

That turned out to be La Fortuna, lying on the floor.

There was a small gamble on unimaginable wealth,

Literally unimaginable, odds know I tried,

That turned out to be a peaceable hour in a closed loop

Within the narrow defile where ravens chortled and trucks

Of interstate construction workers parked for lunch. What luck.

Winter Day in Springdale, Utah, 29 January 2017

The world was full of things it was not full of.
It was normal to know of the abnormal, common
To know of rarities. That there were things unusual
Was the usual state of affairs, and yet the weird
Remained just that and there was no ordinary didn't
Contain the extraordinary that defined it. Hard frost
Silvered the garden gate and split the irrigation lines.
Hard frost gave way to sun and wind, then only sun
And tourists eating lunch at Oscar's Cafe, including
The fellow who asked that the onions on his burger
Be put through a blender as he could only love them
Puréed. "I'll bet no one ever asked you that before!"
He fairly boasted to the bemused server whose face
Bore an expression suggesting many weirder unique
Requests had been made. Uniquely weird is not so
Special, pal. We took our snacks down to the river,
Fine sands redistributed over sunwarmed sandstone,
The once and future dunes. A thin dime scraped
From the mud dumplings body and daughter made
To throw in the water bore the unlikely date 1956.
Had you predicted a dime of that date would emerge
From the sand of this afternoon you would have been
Wrong except when you were right, quite implausibly,
To say the least, yet nothing in the slightest extraordinary
About a warm spell in this canyoned desert in January,
A tourist with a goofy demand, a dime minted
Sixty-odd years ago popping out of the sand.
Body made a wish, highly unlikely to succeed,
And threw the dime in the stream. The world remained
So full of things it was nearly emptied of.

Mukuntuweap, Utah, 28 January 2017

A day like a life, begun in the dark and ended
In the dark, with in between a number of joys
And minor frights, so much for today. I wasted,
Savored, and recycled. Mid-day, my daughter
And I loaded up the back of the car with every empty
Glass item the house and garage had accumulated
Since our last trip to the community bins. Clear,
Green, brown, well-rinsed or slightly funky,
We tossed them through the hatch and winced
As they crashed and shattered out of sight. The sun
Shone brightly on the muddy, littered ground. The snow
On the dun cliffs and peaks surrounding our homeliness
Had thinned to an exquisite lace hand-tatted
By thermodynamic gods. Daughter ran into a copse
Of nearby pines in search of a missing fairy book, narrating
Madly as she went, reemerging with a holy grail
Of scuffed scarlet shotgun shell casing that she said held
The lost potion that could make magic reappear.
What else? Later we invented a game with wood chips
And a chain-link fence, another game with ropes
And a wooden swing. Recycled, savored, and wasted.
No good news came. Bad news whispered a refrain,
But kept to the periphery of the cliffs hissing with melted ice.
The benefits of ignoring the inevitable ignored the cost.
We played a board game with clues when it got to be night.
In bed at the end, body thought of the scarlet potion lost.

Zion, Virgin, Hurricane, Utah, 27 January 2017

This date began with someone else's body entering
The room, the bed, leaving the door ajar, leaving again
And then returning, pressing up against body, haunting
And preventing much or any more sleep from happening.
Dawn was an alarm in a black morning under the stars.
By the time the day had turned into a sunlit passage
Down the canyon between the lava wall and the river,
Body and someone else's body had fallen apart.
Children bundled their own bodies and backpacks in the back.
Snow mountains shed clouds. A ghost only proves someone's missing.

Children Counting, Canyon Route, 26 January 2017

When I remembered to look more carefully, I could see
That all these patterns returning around me that I gave
The same names were never the same, not even the names.
Body studied the outer wall where the lava flow had slowed,
Now the curve the highway nestled, river opposite,
While daughter and friends discussed their teeth
On the way to school. "I've lost nine." "I've lost two."
"I have twenty-three right now and a hole. That's
Twenty-four." "I have twenty-eight, all told." "Liar."
Tooth counts too slippery to count on made the case.
Cows and ostriches threw shadows in the valley shallows.
A little similarity was a dangerous thing. These were
All dangerous things. What was changing, then, if
Everything was change? Nothing changed.
What was was not what it was, not ever. What was it?
In the evenings, returning home, the black wall
Sometimes glowed to let me know it moved still. Liar.

Mozart's Starling, The Butchershop, Saint George, Utah, 25 January 2017

"After his death, he was further disappointed"  ~Amazon reviewer

I led a life that laughed for joy and trembled
Often for dread. In that I was as ordinary as any.
Mozart had a pet starling he bought for ten bucks
And kept for three years that could whistle the opening
Bars of one of his piano concertos. When the starling
Died, Mozart buried him in the garden and composed
A poem for epitaph. When Mozart died, he was tossed
In a pauper's grave without a stone. I would have rather
Been the captive starling, I think, since no bird cares
How it might be wept or disregarded after death.
A human eulogizes the losses reminding him he's lost.
It was Mozart he was weeping. Yet, the happiness
When he brought the little prisoner home and jotted
The bird's notes replicating his own music, error
Of G-sharp notwithstanding, noting "That was fine!"
That I felt, centuries later, that cosmos-created human
Delight. I recognized that delight. That was fine.

Time Is an Existential Category, Diner on Saint George Boulevard, 24 January 2017

I accepted time more easily than most. It made me

Worse. I never hungered much for time machines,
At least not into my own past, but I was therefore
Unmoored from faith in an eternity, any eternity, any
Permanent, fictional thing, whether god or mountain,
Law or principle. Durable means changing more slowly
Than the neighborhood of changing surroundings.
The oldest rock art remains, stripped of meaningful context
And younger than the sun that is slowly but inevitably
Exhausting its giant, steady, ordinary-star sized
Fire. I accepted that, much as I disliked the implications,
Because time doesn't keep everything from happening
At once, it keeps everything from not happening at all,
At least for a little while. Difference is all. The end result
Ends all. Can't have anything existing without everything
Passing away, I said, wanting of course more existing
For me, more eternity passing away. That's what was
Wrong with me as I sat by a plate-glass window to eat,
Sun on the torn vinyl booth, traffic passing on the street.

Arizona Strip After a Storm, 23 January 2017

Familiar furnishings: power lines and fast clouds overhead,
Black heifers browsing scrub desert below, mutely
Ever-changing mountains dead ahead, top halves today
In snow. Body pulled the car over to contemplate everything
Good and true, not separately but where the vast Venn circles
Overlapped in a sliver like the rounding error of a nearly
Departed eclipse. It was both good and true to be under
The brilliant sky on another big windy day, true and good
To be warm and fed and capable of savoring the scene.
Outside of this edge between Nevada and Utah, outside
Of this elderly, still-purring car, outside of the overlapping
Spheres of passing contentment, passing storm front
Over the ruffled heifers among the knob-headed Joshua trees,
Lurked many minatory truths, sure, and fluttered many moths
Of good and pretty falsehoods, such as that this world meant
Any one being well, such as that body had been a good man.
Never mind for now. Here we were, the light not gone out,
The options, however small in the carefully cupped palm,
Not none. In the balance, body blessed the afternoon
And the afternoon did not demand the end. Amen.

The Little Kids' Magic Kit, Winderland, 22 January 2017

For her last birthday, my daughter got
A beginner's magic kit. A few simple tricks,
But what if? I'll tell you what if. If it

Did any actual magic, just one bit, one
Break in the known rules of the cosmos,
The tiniest rip in the fabric of things,

Not just spooky, suggestive, unheimlich,
Not something we could later discuss
Excitedly, was that it? No. Not a hint,

An event, even if only a blip, would shake
The foundations of eternity and
Everything that came after it.

A Dire Wrist at the March, Saint George, Utah, 21 Jan 2017

It wasn't long before my wrist was sore,
Holding up a phone on the sidewalk
To record the marchers, all the marchers, each one

Filing past, a few drumming, most holding
Signs or wearing symbolic items of clothing
And accessories, pink shirts, jackets, hats.

My knees could barely keep under me
Without collapsing, even leaning
Against a spindly tree. I was not marching.

I was only testifying to an event rather larger
Than me. For half an hour and a few
They kept coming past. It was barely

An echo of the vast metropolitan marches
That afternoon around the tiny planet,
But this was not a town for protest

Against male authority, as a rule, and I
Had friends and loved ones out in it,
Including the daughter with the handmade

Sign saying "Girls are great!!" You never
Forget your first march, someone said.
Can you remember your last, I wondered,

Obsessed as I am with forgetfulness
These days, keeping my recordings
Of every small event and sometimes

Even large ones, such as this frolicsome,
Globally coordinated defiance, such as this.
Somewhere, the forests, the true forests,

Remained infinite and permanent
And guarded by demons hard to resist.
A diarist never knew how things would turn out

But never stopped feeling a few more words,
A few more pictures would allow an answer
To emerge, a good, communal memory to persist.

The Musicker, Flash Flood, Utah, 20 January 2017

I represented the unrepresentable.

I was not the unrepresentable itself.
I struggled to translate an early instance
Of an old tradition: "I want to be quiet
And live in the woods. I want to be quietly
Gone." Back then, even then, the woods
Themselves already were more and more gone.
The notion of poets and sages wandering
Away from the stink of the villages and towns
Was already quaint while the priests were still
Copying exercises involving myths of conquering
Nature monsters of the mountains. The real
People most likely to be found in the woods
Were the remnants of indigenes, plus bandits,
Wood cutters, and, then as now, the poor.
The poets writing about wandering were not often
Far from begging among the madding crowd. It's hard
To translate them seriously, properly, now, impossible
To represent them, then, so much later and less
Forest since. The more likely interpretation
Of what seemed like a somber dream of retreat
Is that the wheezy little fat man breathed alone,
Not because he had any hope of a contemplative life
But because, if he had neighbors, they might
Do him an injury. But that, too, is unrepresentable.
"To see sharp and be natural are for me but minor
Terrors." I tried to turn this into some verse
A little more noble but strayed into yet another
Poor paraphrase: Death's hammer breaks illusions.
Death's hammer breaks! The loveliest song that ever was.

Utah in a Picture from Mars, in Utah, 19 January 2017

I carefully scrutinized the photograph made near Mars

In which the Americas can just about be made out
On Earth's daylight side, facing what would have been a new moon
Thin as an eggshell, a lace-sliced seashell in daytime blue
That day. Impossible. I was alive that day, somewhere.
One of the invisible infusoria, I now
Was peering, nearsightedly, at my own distant Petri dish.
Then life that would never end, no matter who died, arrived
For an appointment with the death that would never begin
And sighed, tired. I was also alive that next day and night.

Involuntary, Hurricane, Utah, 18 January 2017

He did something odd with his hands.
Doves cooed and whales sang in his guts.
He said, "I worried through decisions
I had no power to take, rehearsed
The things I had to say I never
Had to say, and made a mess of things
That made the mess of me." The barn
And old equipment left to fall
Apart entranced him when it caught
The early morning winter sun,
A painting come to life. The cars
And houses, stores and parking lots
Were crowding in around its field
Abandoned to the straw. He said,
"I don't know how to leave all this
Hallucinated world except
Involuntarily." He left.

North Fork Campsite, Utah, 17 January 2017

Between spells of some kind of actual winter, the warmth

Of a desert January lowered the streams, made them
Clear their throats of mud and debris, made them chuckle again
As if all were cheerful, and why not? Every interval
Of pleasure, brief or durable, is that, an interval.
In listening to water laughter, letting waves of sun
Play on my life-strewn face, I had a kind of happiness
That was not the object of that all-American quest
But like a kind of relief, a rest. I hoped I would be
As capable of savoring cold change when the time came.

The Trail of Death, Virgin River, Utah, 16 January 2017

"Amazon’s voice-controlled Echo device is 'always getting smarter' — but making us dumber." ~NYT op ed lede

Along the shore the flood had rearranged,

Daughter told body, " I call this the trail

Of death." Why? Bucolic spot in the sun,

Green-brown skein of stream, fine sand deposits,

Grand, sheer cliffs glowing against the blue egg

Of atmosphere, what's particularly 

Death about this? "We saw a coyote

Totally dead lying here. We felt bad."

Ah, body said, I see, although body

Saw something else in imagination

Not to do with coyotes, entirely.

Never mind. Never, ever again mind.

Three hours of perfect play ensued: mud cakes,

Sand castles, Pooh sticks under the footbridge.

Body resting on a rock was watching

Another rock askew high up a slope

Overgrown with outcropping rocks askew.

Here's what was bothersome about numbers.

Given the millions of boulders tilting,

It was inevitable some soon fell.

Focus on any one likely suspect,

It amounted to a dead certainty

You would not catch its fall. This is the law

Of lotteries: the most prosaic end,

Inevitable in the general,

Is miracle in the particular.

This was what body had learned from culture,

Culture dependent on stupidity

Dependent on culture. This had gone on

For at least a few hundred thousand years,

Maybe much more: culture getting smarter,

Making us dumber, prion-infested

Miracles of self-domestication

Prior even to any knock-on sheep

Or goats or rice or wheat. Imitation 

Began the accumulation. Language 

Increased storage and portability,

Stories especially. Writing, numbers 

Increased storage and portability. 

Libraries increased storage, codices 

And scrolls portability. Letter-block

Printing presses increased storage, access,

And portability. Daily papers, 

Telegraph wires, telephones, undersea 

Cables, celluloid, radio stations,  

Television, computer servers, webs

Of mail and specialized applications, 

Universal search engines, now AI 

Androids answering off-the-cuff questions:

They all made culture smarter, us dumber.

Too late now to complain about yourself.

You were the body, dim, or the answers,

Clever, or you were neither, carried down

The rain-choked river like the coyote 

You were and I never. You were the blue 

Lid of the eggshell closing forever,

The rude mechanical under a spell,

Unable to answer, save as compelled,

The daughter herself, explaining rivers,

The shore the flood had rearranged itself.

Tumorigenesis, Winderland, 15 January 2017

I went to sleep in the glare of all words.
Woke, what bolder thought than dawn's presumption,
Rain streaming off the eaves of the fading
Red gate? There used to be a hen house here,
But there is a fox for every hen house,
And now the coop is a garden of rocks,
Also dripping.  A today, any day,
Was a way to leave another world, but

The opposite of escape. On a rock
Of adamant, each word world goes to die.
If I had named all of the succulents,
Trees, flowers, vines, and cacti precisely
That fringe my garden of rocks, I would have
Made a lovely, botanical bouquet
Suggesting nothing about the flowers
To anyone who didn't know those names.

Zion Lodge Lawn, Utah, 14 January 2017

Observations granular to the scholar were general
To the microbes composing and composting scholar's gut.
With all its variability like clouds and such, the Earth
Was a bad calibration target for the human telescope
Orbiting Mars, but it made a pretty picture. The scale
From brightly colored bit of blob seen from the red planet
To the teeming competition, teams included, of the myriad
Bacteria in a single mammal's gut only contained
A tiny slice of the scale of the cosmos. The magical body
Hosting a set of synchronized will-o'-the-wisp selves
Pulsing like Smoky Mountain fireflies, turned on itself
To consider coordination, cooperation, and the myth
Of a truer perspective. Truth is, at every known angle,
Alternative perspectives in both dimensions, larger and smaller,
Echo away. Vertigo plagued all attempts at lofty views
Equally. That's the clue. The perspective never
Really changes, never really changed. The daughter
Spinning rainbow ribbon, calling her companions "ninny,"
Was as elevated and as infinitesimal as the cliffs around the lawn,
The ants herding hemipterans in the winter grass. What
Does it mean that your madness and your sanity were
Equally scale invariant while yielding such opposite joys?

Randomness Creek, Predestination, Utah, 13 January 2017

What was this coming to, the days of winter rains gouging

A dry landscape, scoring the cottonwood bottoms with brown wash
And black basalt tumbling, etching the cliffs, drawing the canyons
Down? Nothing much, probably. Not even a minor apocalypse,
Minor nonconformity in the layers of the era. The usual, predictable
Variation of this detailed, repetitive landscape, and more of it, that's all.
A season with slightly higher than mean floods, maybe. A prisoner
In the cell of our earth might wonder, given this current
Order was certainly not necessarily the best, was it even likely
The only one? Among the others, if there were others, companions
For this arrangement, comforts, could there be better, any better
As well as worse? In multiple languages, fate or fate's equivalent
Carries a double meaning, meaning both divinely providential
And/or merest happenstance. Fortuna, tyke, luck: one-word
Oxymorons forever opposing themselves: that's the sort of wisdom
Culture cultivates. In a grey hour, when tires spun in mud under hills
Where the wolves of metaphors and numbers mourned in hunger,
Body knew only that everything would come down, destiny,
And no detail of that come-down, chaos, could be promised, ever.

Salmon Cemetery, Utah, 12 January 2017

Above the road, the sky displayed long strips of clouds
Like half-assembled, half-dissembling shrouds.
White as they had been, they began to glow rose and peach
And arrange themselves in ranks that nosed toward home, each
Becoming less like woven linen, more like lapping scales,
The lustrous bellies of fish, muscular, swollen, frail
Against the full weight of the atmosphere
But flexing and swimming. It appeared
They were going in my direction, up the canyon
Into the teeth of the cliffs to abandon
The appearance of going where they intended
Once they'd gathered all their distended
Substance into one rolling mass, tore, and poured
Fresh rains. Not every cloud attained its jagged shore,
However. Many fell apart before they made new weather,
Fell to wisps of wet and shroud again, apart together.
Ask one, ask any last scrap of fog misting the way,
Any passing shower before it has nothing left to say:
Why such a rush of verses, so late, without a prayer?
I was the salmon in the grizzly's jaws, gushing roe into the air.

Dream Spring, White Reef, Utah, 11 January 2017

The Vedic goddesses, Speech and Night
Attended me, alone in my restless bed.
When I opened my mouth and eyes to breathe
There I was in the impossible afternoon, after
My latest flummoxed death, staring at a wall of red cliffs
Dancing with clouds. It could not be, said Speech
To me from from the hidden mountain of her sister,
Kalaratri. But it was. It was and was positioned thus:
Behind me, south, a steady stream of engines burning
The refined revenants of buried sunlight, roaring;
To my left, the sun itself refueling the whole scene
Unconsciously; to my right, purpling, the eastern dream
Of spring. You cannot see the spring, can not, Speech said,
You should not even be here, overwintering. She turned;
Vak turned her tongue inside my head to tell me that she was
The source of all my hymns and dreams, all my words and visions.
Night only nodded her heavy-crowned forehead, the conqueror,
Palpable blackness, lustrous dark daughter of heaven, and said
Nothing.

The Magus Makes Clouds Open, Elves' Hill, Utah, 10 January 2017

My canes and crutches I had taped back together,

The sleeves of my robe reclaimed from the depths,
The magic leached nightly from my fingertips,
The plagiarized spells to raise a storm that raised
Only those slight breezes theft and imitation promise us,
All these, showing my centuries, I insisted
Were mine. The secret truth is they were,
As I theirs, as I every phrase's, every word's
I ever learned. I opened the fat text of the magus
When I was fourteen, bored and boarded
In a heap of bricks no longer exists, commanded
By a librarian, if I wanted to read magic, I needed
To begin my apprenticeship among the unmagical
Adults who dreamed of being wrong but couldn't
Trust their dreams. The text held nothing but cowardice
And a retreat from the only true question
That presses on an apprentice: is this anything
That will work, for me, is this anything that will work?
Forty years and forty nights vanished under me
And I found myself become the old humbug in a poem
By a younger man, when I had thought I was the one earned
The right to play true Caliban and cry to dream again.

Bench on the Kolob Terrace, Utah, 9 January 2017

Here and there, throughout the day,
I sat with myself, with myself and others.
In a house, in a car, on a bench in the snow,
I kept consciousness together enough
To keep the fiction of I alive a while longer,
Which is all any one of us ever does, whether
Riding into battle roaring, snoring in a pew,
Working on a team like kinfolk, hand in glove, turning
In a lonely cell, or making love. Seated,
Doing as little as I did of any of the above,
I felt like a Byzantine mosaic, like I
Didn't have to turn my head to talk, like I
Could tilt my head, enigmatically,
And signify, automatically. I had a thought
Neither original to me nor to the artistic
Byzantines, but true. And who knows when
Or how any thought first arises? I thought:
It's the body that does the living, the breathing,
The eating and excreting. It's the thought that does
The dying, the me, oh me, oh mying. Further,
You can try to die and fail to die and live
With further dying. But if you're too afraid
To try, you've never lived, were never fully
Living, although you were always dying.
I thought this and thought myself brave until
I thought of my only living daughter crying.

Catasterism, Great White Throne Viewpoint, Utah, 8 January 2017

If you did pretty good as a god, you could get

Your name on a pattern of stars--the story before

The constellation, cart before the Pegasus. Of course,

If you were a god, good or bad, you were the story,

Nothing but. Not a god yet? Become one. Cease

Existing. Come on in to nothing. The water's fine,

So fine you'll never notice it never noticing you.

Don't forget to leave a name and a story behind.

Or do. Do forget. Why add to the stock of dreams

For a dreaming species to which you once belonged?

It's a pity the body has to resist your departure, a pity

You can't, without causing more suffering, just go. You

Were one of a tribe evolved to study the world, the way

All things embrace and resist the way things are, one

With itself and struggling, this world that could produce

Brains soaked in gods and causes, the documentarians

Of the world's own fecund self-resistance, someone who could

Love a good scene, a good story, a good song, who could

Imagine sea serpents and hunters in the heavens, who could,

Of life consuming life, death under the water, write, "The great 

Snail's proboscis was stuck into a black sea urchin whose guts 

It was slowly rasping away. The sea urchin's spines waved a last, 

Futile defense but its systems were failing fast." That disaster,

That catastrophe, that ordinary piece of dying to satisfy hunger,

Put that in a story, a god, in the stars. Put yourself away,

Your guts, your failing systems, your futile defenses. You are

Worthy of becoming forgotten, far under, 

Far from the wordy stars.

Die Not Before Thy Day, Winderland, 7 January 2017

I palmed the wooden egg and smiled.
This forest was a trifling toy--
Terrible to remember now;
Delight at the time to enjoy.

The surface of the egg was smooth,
Polished as marble, fine as silk.
But something inside it trembled
And shifted like a bowl of milk.

I had an urge to open it,
To run a nail along the curves
Until I found its hidden latch.
I fingered it and something swerved--

A click, and it blossomed petals,
The inside of each petal fuzzed
With countless tiny, sharp-tipped firs.
I looked down in and there I was.

The black firs towered over me.
The ground was needle carpeted.
The night songs that weren't nightingales
But more like morning larks instead

Rose between the ranks of branches
And wrapped their notes around the stars.
I sensed I had lost my senses
But wasn't in the least alarmed.

I was home. I was my own
Idea of an extensive wood,
A forested ourobouros
Encircling me, and it felt good.

Joshua Tree Road, Arizona, 6 January 2017

Time slip: the sorrowful father was standing
Alone by the side of the road, his native habitat.
It was the wrong date for a day that had been
One of the impossibles, baroque. Sky lowered
Into the olive brown Mojave hills, the greasewood,
The creosote, the Joshua trees, and the unsealed tracks,
Like a heavy-set, elderly invalid easing onto a dirty bed.
The overly mournful father could swear he heard the clouds sigh.
Compose yourself, I thought. It goes on. It goes on.
You go with it. You go, too. The body of the clouds
Sagged more. The occasional vehicle on the sealed tar
Made the only wind. What day was it, then, if not this date?
It's a great fear, not to know how to end again, once you begin.
It's a great fear not to remember how to forget how to forget.
That other day, earlier, wronger, not this wrong, the atmosphere
Had been thinner, allowed a hazy haloed crescent moon
And Enif to glow through at dusk. Muzzle of Pegasus.
Made a wish. Placed a bet on the wings of a horse. Lost
Consciousness once, twice, three times. Here is body
Who is not body, sad by the side of the road without knowing
Why, without remembering the path that led here, without
Proper distinction between the body of self and of clouds.
The shadow of the body is not the shadow of the body.
It is the body of the whole. What whinnied from the sky?

Go back home, prodigal father. Go back home, wandering child.

Zion, Acadia, 5 January 2017

The park was as close to looking ugly as it gets,
The pallid grey winter day not even threatening,
Just exhausted, too tired to be darkly grey,
The old snow now rag-tag, the waterfalls gone,
The cottonwoods barren, the brown grasses matted.
The ranger at the gate asked me how I was,
And when I replied "not bad," protested.
"'Not bad'!? How can you only be not bad?
You're in Acadia!" Then she realized her mistake
And flushed. "Oops, I mean Zion." I smiled.
"I'm guessing your last park posting was Acadia,"
I suggested. She chortled. "Nine years!" Then
Looked a bit nostalgic as I drove on through.
Inside, I was surprised that even on this day,
Homely, cold, the holidays all finally behind us,
The parking lots at Weeping Rock and Sinawava
Were full. I felt a gust of snobbish pity then
For the tourists whose only day here was this day,
When I had seen the great cliffs and formations
In all weathers, snowstorms and thunderstorms,
Sweltering heat, delicate late-winter days already spring
On the canyon floors, sweet dampness in the air,
Entire palettes of pale greens dotting every branch,
Autumn spectacles of colors alchemists schemed to create,
Golds and bronzes, salamandrine fires. This vortex
Of visitors, falling rocks, and transformations, this resurrection
Of condors and bighorns, this protection, this oversight,
This Acadia of its own kind, however overrun, I saw it.
I wanted to call back to the ranger, shout she'd been right.
I drove higher, into the almost supernatural, dovish grey light.

Parking Lots, Washington, Utah, 4 January 2017

Drove, sat, sometimes for hours, sometimes
Went in. After having a dream in which I was selected
To go on an interstellar mission through a wormhole
To colonize a new earth, never to return, a dream
Of unconscionable, delirious joy, never to come here again,
Here I was again. Sleep is a short trip to the mall
By comparison. After having a dream of leaving
With others, launching into deep space, took my daughter
To the county clerk's office to renew her passport.

Doing As Told, Mystery, Utah, 3 January 2017

Sat in a straight-back chair, brilliant blue,
And invited universal Qi to rip the guts of me.
Body ever did love quiet, nearly motionless
Contemplation of the vast and violent mystery.

The more alone I am, I thought, the more fond
I am of myths. All will be well, but in case it is not,
I need to decide now how best to prepare body
To rejoin the planet and dissolve on its own again.

Awareness, surrender awareness. Awareness
Causes nothing. There's nothing to prepare. I do; I do
Not cause the doing, do not cause the knowing
Of the doing, do not cause the knowing, I thought.

Bedroom Under Watchman, Zion, 2 January 2017

Watched a late, sudden glow flood the cliffs last night.

Woke up, already one full day of a new year behind me,

Which made, what, nineteen thousand eight hundred

Forty-eight turns since birth. What could not happen began 

To happen. Used to mention the millennium like it was

The future, like it was new. No longer. Good

And stuck into it now. How was the twentieth-century

View from the start of the fourth year of the Great War?

No more mistaken for the fin de siecle, to be sure.

Likewise no mistaking this whatever it is for whatever

Went just before. Bodily dragging through the day, felt

Some violation of the game, some offense had been made

Just to be doing this again. Everyone wants to know when

It's too long, when it's time, when it's long past

Time to go, but no one can know for sure. Woke up

This morning, already one full day of the new year

Behind me, which could only mean death remained,

Politely, in front of me, still waiting for me to catch up.

Zion, New Year, 2017

Leaned out of the window into a brisk wind at midnight
And looked up at the old hunter of alternative worlds,
Cold fires over the garden gate: local time.
Welcomed the swap in numbers, meaningless though it was,
Because it was meaningless and made of nothing
But meaning. Pure signifying, no monkeying around
This calendar now. This was not the transformation
I had expected to undergo, except as something other
Than me. But here we were, body, thoughts, microbes,
And fresh numbers. One way or another my number
Is bound to come up, the one that's a winner, the one
That's a metaphor for a conclusion more likely. I gathered
My strength for the invisible, arbitrary leap across
The chasm at midnight. Reader, I leapt it. But not
In a single bound. Many, many bounds involving me.
The hunter beyond the bounds of empires winked.
The old man in the convenience store across the state line,
Back in the old dispensation, said, "You remember, it's not much,
But it's better'n a kick in the head." Never will see then again.
Back to bed, tiny bug. Morning sweeping toward you. Sleep.