By the Waters of Zion, Utah, 28 February 2017

I refused to weep. Instead, body thought

About samhita, how it meant well-made,

Composed, and I decided to compose 

Myself. The sky was tremulous, dark,

And spitting occasional hail. Nothing

Is less actually meaningful than weather,

Which at most can only be made to predict

Itself, but nothing feels more portentous.

I had come with the cows to shelter

Under the cottonwood trees, to bellow.

I thought of all those early herding peoples,

My transoceanic ancestors among them,

Their passionate deification of storms,

Their terror of what lurked in mountains,

Deserts, woods, oceans, how they glorified

Lightning personified, how it slew

The wilderness for them, fire and light.

Whatever we once had to do with woods,

We're children of smiths and alchemists,

Fired clays and metal edges, terror now.

There on the edge of almost-scraped clear

Canyons of elk and condors, absent wolves,

Former haunts of antlered deities and voices

Whispering out of the mouths of rocks,

While the veils of late-winter snow dragged 

Blank scrims across receding ridges,

I also thought of that one hunter who fled up

Into the Alps, wearing and carrying the kit

Of metallic civilizations to come, idiot,

Trying to escape the only-human arrows

That lodged in his lungs and bled him

As he lay in the snow and froze, alone.

Not lightning, not any sky god, not any

Lord of cultivation saved him, but the dragon

Of ice and wilderness enfolded him

And protected him as a talisman to scare us

With thousands of years later, 

With thousands of years of getting better

At playing dragon-slaying children of heaven

Under our belts. If I could have found

The winged and still four-legged serpent,

The air snake, the ocean monster, I would

Not have taunted it, tried to stab it, I would

Have told it, I hope you coil around this hymn

Of mine, no better than all the others before

That boasted triumphs of well-made things,

Of our weapons and gods, jewelry, buildings,

Containers, hearths, verses, and rituals,

And crush the last breath out of it, Vritra.

Dead Tree, Utah, 27 February 2017

Never could keep a living tree alive
By trying, myself, he apologized.
So this was going to be one of those poems,
One whining like a dull knife being honed
On an old stone, not many sparks. Whispers
Could be the poem or the wind. Listeners
Were not there. The hissing in the branches
Was a dull blade scraping old bone. Chances
Were the random cosmos had decided
Against whatever could have provided
The previously dying tree enough
To throw out a few more buds, nuts, and such.
All over now, he said, reminding me,
He was there, commentary, not just tree.

Backyard, Utah, 26 February 2017

Yesterday, I tried to compose myself. Say it
With me. Yesterday I tried to compose
Myself. Now, who succeeded, you or me?
Call and reader-response poetry, you see.
There was a time a concrete poem could be
Made of unintelligible sounds, and poems
About stuff, about subjects, could be
Concrete. Fair enough. I heard a poem die
Once, while I buzzed. Help me. Help me!
I meant to cry, but I was too tiny, too unlike
I. The grass is brown with winter, brown
Itself with spotted age, ready to give way
To spring again. The worm is stirring
In the roots of the words that worms churn.
This passing patch holds more kinds
Of life competing and competing
By collaborating than words can betray
To the emperor of decay. Yesterday,
A grey sky in a local space, a child
With a cough and impetigo and earache
On the couch mainlining infectious shows,
And a late middle-aged man hardly capable
Of walking as it was, declining to help
The cries of the millions of small lives
Like his own, in his own, like him, in him,
The flies and worms, grass, leaves, dreams,
And microorganisms, declining. I tried,
He wrote, composing himself, lying, I tried.

Myside Bias, Virgin, Utah, 25 February 2017

The Markandeya Purana claimed people

In hell suffered much for seeing people

In heaven but rejoiced whenever one

In heaven fell and joined them in hell,

While the people in heaven also suffered

Despite all the heavenly wonderfulness

Because, from the moment they arrived

They could see hell and think for themselves

That is where I am going to fall. Resting

On the heavenly banks of the Virgin

And smelling from across the water

The sun-warmed cattle patties of the cows

From hell, body relaxed enough to read

A book review of three new texts explaining 

Why humans can't be swayed by facts

That don't support what we think we already

Know, although we're excellent critics

Of the flaws in opposing arguments.

It seems we evolved to cooperate, silly, not

To make any sense. Only a kind

Of carefully pitched homeostatic technique,

Say, science, has a prayer of a chance

To keep our myside lies and furies opposed

So that everyone gets roundly criticized

And the winning deconstructions actually

Win. I'd say that for culture science was kin

To the moment in the evolution of life

When cells first actively locomoted

By pushing within and against themselves

To bestir their pulsing walls to budge.

Once that trick was accomplished, progress

Meant something, jaws, armor, and flight.

Attack and escape were on their way.

Lost in this abstracted reverie, this bliss

In which body could fantasize a godlike 

Perspective on deep time, I felt a breeze

Caress my old skull the way a teasing kid

Or an exasperated spouse might tousle 

My remaining thoughts, and I remembered 

Where and when I was in my eroding life.

Spooked, I caught myself looking down 

Into the vertiginous, schadenfreude-hungry,

Lost faces I imagined watching me back 

From the waves, waiting eagerly for me 

To cooperate, become one among them, 

Become one with our side, the one that won.

My Two-Hundredth Century of Days, Cedar Pockets Wash, Arizona, 24 February 2017

I hadn't seen this gorge so green before.
It looked dusted by forgiveness and lust,
Life having agreed to try one more time
To make a heaven of heaven's despite.
Hunger had consumed itself and hunger
Was ready to begin to make amends
Again, again growing itself something
To eat by starting with water, rocks, light.
Here I am, sang the Green Man inside me,
Ready to nourish this barren canyon,
Ready to offer the impossible
To its inevitable conclusion.
I am reused words' evergreen yearning,
Old God cried out from every bush burning.

Tuphos, Storm Grove, Utah, 23 February 2017

The soul of Demonax of Cyprus, immortal
In the way that everything is, protested
To a for-profit prophet, If we can change
The future by knowing it, what was it
You saw and sold? Destiny it wasn't.
And if it were, true fate, why pay to know it?
No storms were in the forecast. Storms
Were in the past. Clouds played hand
Shadow puppets with the distant cliffs.
Here's a bunny. Here's a hawk. Look,
It's a giant coyote lolling in the canyon.
What did these shadows and lights foretell?
That yesterday some things happened
That will not happen today. What things?
Whirlwinds. Smoking carpets of curled lava
Hundreds of days wide. Lightning bolts
Fencing the dialogues of the dead.
You know. The usual yesterdays. Destiny.
Leviathan, the unknowable child of time.
I sat by the river as usual and read. Stones
Occasionally cracked loose overhead,
Reminding me of another black thought
I'd forgot. Immortal as everything, the wind.

Divine Dementia, Night Camp, Utah, 22 February 2017

Confusions multiplied in the nocturnal murk of my language.
Given that everything, from the infinitely small, to the infinitely extensive
Changed and was changing, however slightly, with each infinitesimal
Instant in passing, how was there any similarity at all? What was there
To change that was not wholly change? The dark God of everything
Encountered me on my way back down to Egypt and sought to kill me
In my night camp, as He had done to one before, but this time I had no sons.
I had one daughter and no idea which sacred incantation could save me or her
Secure from all alarm. Thus, I muttered to myself, we must endure
Transfiguration without understanding, events carved out of cutbanks,
But we can't seem to stop ourselves from trying, demanding to understand.
The river ran unusually fast and noisily beside me, thick with sediment
Like my thoughts. It was only a pebble in the ancient text, that narrative bit
About the God who sought to destroy His own messenger and was thwarted.
It haunted me because I thought, in my own gravel-grinding head, I could sense
That which was that was not wholly change in the way a tale could remain
Shifting in context, pronouns ripped out of referential grounding, but
Retain, even perhaps enhance or attain an identity as itself, as apart
From the greater narrative carrying it along. Change creates the illusion
Of something ancient and unchanged by changing it, by making contrast.
That fragment of an encounter between the God bent on destruction
And His messenger of blood grew larger because of being reduced, stripped
And isolated within a stream of later, louder, plaited words and rush.
Something in the paradox felt like a dark and emptied hint about paradoxes,
But then I fumbled it, lost it, and it tumbled away from me, and there I was
Beside the river that had carried and then buried that memory,
That fragment, my idea, as it would carry me away and bury me.
In the night camp, the storied survivor who would never fully enter Zion
Struggled to remember what had happened, why the phrasing he wanted,
"Bent on destruction" would not come to him, what he held in common
With the ever-shifting dark around His question what had shifted, what
Remained. What was ever there before it changed? What was there to change?

We Never Changed Each Others' Minds in Utah, 21 February 2017

Sin required other people, other victims, to believe,
Protest, believe, confess. Otherwise, we were only the beasts
With no need for confession. How horrible would that be?
Words like illusion, delusion, maya, samsara interested me.
If everything was unreal and deceptive, how would you know
What really exists, what real could be? In a cosmos
Consisting of falsehoods entirely, falsehoods were reality.
It felt honest to say that and not this, this and not that,
But it wasn't, or, if it was, we'd no way of knowing the differences.
I unrolled my feathers and rowed me softer home, sinless
As I swam. Eleven to fourteen million data points attended
Every sensory second of me, but I heard only one or none.

Tevah, Court of the Patriarchs, Utah, 20 February 2017

No one ever ran out of time. Time suffocated us.
There weren't any grains in the hourglass to measure, only
Quicksand underfoot, climbing the thighs, to struggle against
Or accept. Thought was an ark, a reed basket sealed in pitch,
Built to float as the wet sand clutched and rose. Future prophets,
Future visionaries, scientists, lunatics, poets,
Were incubated in that fragile echo of a skull.
Names and explanations, technologies and instructions,
All we made, all that might survive us, floated as we sank,
And each ark was a lure that trapped more. Wade out. Reach. Drown. Think.

Elegy for Me, Thrown by My Student, Horse, Utah, 19 February 2017

She gave me the chance to show off
To myself and pretend someone was
Listening, although I knew she wasn't.
She wanted to hear herself think, which
Was fair enough, her thoughts being
So faint and mine so loud and so nearly
Cruel. I wanted her to opine and challenge
Me, and she did. She allowed me, then,
To unfurl my exquisite scrolls of calligraphic
Sentiments and self-congratulatory
Twists of English, even if she answered
Hardly any of it except to laugh and put down
Some more in her own voice, which was fair.
Readers who write to each other of reading
Are writers who can't feed themselves
Without ignoring any other being feeding.
Dodging her hooves once she tossed me,
I balanced, a raven, happy on the fencepost
Closest to the roadkill of whatever
Text she had trampled to study, each of us
Delighted by the nourishment of our mutual
Decay and destruction. Which was fair.

Coyote Gulch, Utah, 18 February 2017

I could feel my life as me pulling away from my life
As them, and I wanted to rejoice and remain me, but
I knew, too, the tear was killing me and would, at the least,
Harm them. Who wants a life of harming them? Who wants to die?
We wake up to discover our soft selves already here.
Those of us lucky enough to have parents scream at them,
Almost inevitably, "I didn't ask to be born!"
But neither did they, neither did anyone, anything,
And then we find ourselves, like all the rest, begging to stay,
Another year, another month, an hour, a week, a day.

Scenes from an Internal Border, Utah-Arizona, 17 February 2017

Bone-white prayer flags blowing in the moonlit morning courtyard
Dawn paling the tops of the cliffs glimpsed through higher windows
Young women speeding to work in unremarkable cars
Golf carts slowly circling tattered palms and big cottonwoods
California condor circling over the Watchman
Flushed red with a late winter sunset fading into grey
Mare's tails near Shivwits Paiute Indian Reservation
Chasing each other over the formerly clear blue sky
A roadwork red light alone among burnt juniper trees
And one driver waiting forever between there and here

Wreck of Venus on the West Temple, Utah, 16 February 2017

Draco and Hunter were both on attack,
Taking aim at the glaring emerald wanderer
While a jet plane's blinking lights connected
The belt to the bow to the jaws and gone.
Out there on the recursive road to nowhere,
I was rooting for it rather than against it.
I want what is not me to win, but I want
To be there to see it, which I can't be
Unless I don't get what I want and it
Doesn't win, and then I remain to witness
Its or my futility. We don't want that, now,
Do we? It's bad enough to spit in the eye
Of the gods of odds, but to dismiss even
The fully divisible as risible fictions
Is the quickest way to become a fiction
Oneself. I was a body who had no chance
And therefore chanced to wrestle with what
Could not possibly be pinned down
By anyone, anyway, least of all me.
Why not then? Because I knew I was leaving
One hell of a mess once I left my innocence
To pretend I could step into the air without
Succumbing to the gravity that offended me.
Others who still had that innocence were
Too close to me and would have to fall
After me or teeter on the brink long years
Of their own, wondering, how could that me
Do that to this me? Hesperus, protect those
From the madness that infected me, though
I know you won't. I know we all rise and shine
Then sink behind our temples and drown.

Making the Rounds, Utah, 15 February 2017

I celebrated my awareness of nothing
And bemoaned my nothing of awareness,
And then I did the reverse.  Even Pina's
Parkour cross-town choreography kept
The concept of dance mostly circular
And confined. Turn, counter-turn, and rant:
That was my compositional strategy,
Day in and day out for over half a decade.
How can we know the exploration from
The excitement of the commuter seeing
Home and knowing it for the nth time?
There has been one hero in human history,
And that hero was the first machine
We hurled high and hard enough to clear
The air and our whizzing orrery entirely,
Deservedly a voyager, out past the pause
Of no return. The rest was all dancing
And pretending surprise at the way
Rhythm compelled and constrained
The similarity we called timeless geometry.
I was no better nor worse than the rest
Of the tired dogs stamping circular beds
To lie down and die in, me, with my nothing
Of awareness, my awareness of nothing.

Invasion by Another Name, St. George, UT, 14 February 2017

The infinite was always
Here in our hands and ready
To engulf us. One atom
Was a cosmos, one cosmos
An atom. The little was big
Because it was infinite,
The big infinitely small.

Verse by an unknown artist,
Rhyming fragments of the known,
Could slip the invisible
Noose of a notname, and drop
Uninvited spots of ink
Onto the gauze of a ghost.
Stains spread in all directions.

Valentine's Table, Rockville, Utah, 13 Feb 2017

Bern had set up a long folding table
Full of arts-and-crafts supplies
In her family room on the Robb Creek Bridge
Road in the middle of Rockville. Daughter
And body went over on a Sunday afternoon
To spend an hour or two hand-making
Valentine's Day cards. Colter the Irish Setter
Supervised, big head under the table,
Tail whapping our legs on patrol. Grey
Day, dour talk of presidencies and politics,
Pretty, silly cartoon hearts and scissors,
Purple glue and paper flowers. Daughter
Made a card for her kindergarten teacher.
Body made a card for calendrical time.
We talked about Australia, about Outback,
About Darwin and crocodiles and the other
Side of the world. There was, we knew,
No other side extant, only the sides we knew
And the side we'd never know, whence
All our loves and conversations had to go.

Vision, Utah, 12 February 2017

The moon obscured the clouds. Pearl before
Pale miracles, long vapors higher than life
Would ever have allowed them to float, she
Eclipsed herself and remerged from the lost
Side of her face. I wanted to say I knew I was
Dreaming, but I didn't. Nothing so easy
An excuse as that. The rules had altered
And by altering had proven themselves to be
Only rules, after all, only rules. She floated
Nearer and nearer until the trees on the cliffs
Were also above and behind her. She was
A fairy now, a deity, a soul, a poem, another
In the innumerable lies made possible
By memory's discovery of narrative
And story's disrespect for the impossible.
Body sat on a rocker by the window clung
With mist. Daughter sprawled on a rug
With a window opening into the floor,
Looking down into another one of these
Worlds where moons can drift to ground.
The moon I had in mind drew closer.
Whatever there is in the experience of life
That refuses all wishes, all prayers, all
Attempts to rearrange its possibilities,
Call that the god that matters. The rest
Are only combinatorial systems of play
That can't ever answer the question of why
They are powerless, why there is power.
When I looked away from my imagination
There was an actual lizard, small, scaled,
Tilting its head to eyeball me from its perch
On the handle of a white wicker basket filled
With daughter's picture books and readers.
That a lizard would approach me at home
Did not amaze me. A lizard isn't the moon,
Although I couldn't imagine the reason.

Petrified Virgin, Utah, 11 February 2017

Names as phenomena themselves change
And slide like the rock face beside me when
I paused in the long drive through almost
But never the same. Names for phenomena,
However, remain impoverished patches
Making it seem, while they last, that things
Exist and are countable and accountably
Stable. I have been lulled to boredom
Many times by the apparent sameness
Of things for which I had insufficient names.
This township on a river for instance, when
I waited for an end to claim me, seemed
Like a repetition. Here I am again, same
Old place, same old name, why even
State it when it's over and over the same?
I supposed sameness is longing, is fear,
Although fear only slows even the most
Skilled creature capable of standing as stock
Still as the deer that froze and observed me
While I parked under the furrowed brow
Of that lava wall I'd composed my thoughts
Around before. See? Nothing happening
Here. The doe disappeared, or tried;
The name for the stones, pillowed lava once
Flowing, long cold, reappeared, looking
No different, the wall no different, the town,
Same thing, same poem. Same names
For everything. I turned off the sickly
Sounding engine, rolled open a window, then
Waited until the doe, no names of her own,
Twitched an ear and ran for the river. Wind
Picked up, rumbled, and winter trees rustled,
But I had no names left to exchange for her.

Lee Inholding, Zion, Utah, 10 February 2017

I drove over and over up the road to the gap
In the national park: grass and a few
Small buildings comprising an estate
Preexisting the surrounding destination.
Any hole in a place is a wrinkle in time.
I fantasized buying it. It was for sale,
Although even in better days I could never
Have afforded such an extensive mirage.
Every time I checked the realty sign,
Body nodded in mute amazement that this
Impossible opportunity still continued
And had not yet been swallowed by events
As I soon expected myself consumed.
I promised to use any miracle to move life
Into that gap, stretch it out, and call it
A hermitage. Finally, I felt I had to promise
To do no such thing. Miracles are for leaving,
Not for returning to dig, badger, deeper in.
Oh, but all those melting towers and shelves
Of red sandstone spires, jagged mountains,
The tawny, veldt-like expansive of the grass
In late summer, the copse of Gambel oaks
Hiding one tiny cabin, the thick, undisturbed
Snow, barely tracked even by deer weeks
After each winter storm, the unbearable
Blue, the presumable solitude. I could die
To live out my mean lifespan through those
Windows showing only cloud lengths of time
Outside, as I was, and without. I could die.

The Dead Book, Herculaneum, Utah, 9 February 2017

The charred, obsidian cylinder flaked
Ash if I touched it. Heavy as a stone,
It still showed fine, sedimentary lines
Like the rings of a petrified tree trunk
When viewed from either end. There was no way
To pry those lines apart, not the least bit.
Whatever words might have been inside it,
My only choice was to leave it alone

Or destroy it. I tried to imagine
My way through it, using x-ray vision,
Laser-like insight, solemn resonance.
I thought of all the divine names for life
That might cause it to unwind and reveal
Undead emotion. I wrote it myself.

Golf Course, Arizona, 8 February 2017

Retirees crowded around the rental carts,
Arranging themselves in foursomes for nine rounds.
"To be or not to be, that is the question,"
Someone joked, apropos of nothing certain
I could observe of their carts or their pairings.
Others took up the refrain, pleased with themselves
For saying the thing, the famous thing, best known
Line in English literature. "To be or
Not to be." Laughter. "To be or not to be."
Murmuring. Chuckles. "To be or not to be."
White heads wearing visors rode out, armed with clubs.

West on I-70 through Utah, 7 February 2017

Black Dragon, Ghost Rock, Lone Tree, Salt

Wash, Sinbad, Sigurd, Elsinore, the names

Of exits and overlooks paraded, along

With repeated signs warning of deer and elk,

One leaping stag silhouette altered to seem

To be propelled by jet-fuel flatulence painted

Exiting the rump in a red and black cloud.

Humans never grow up. A thousand years

After a monk scribbled the vernacular 

"Sumer is icumen in" in the margins 

Of an illuminated Latin text, a hundred years

After Ezra Pound lampooned the monk

By publishing his "Winter is icumen in"

Squib, and thirty years after I first taught

With the Norton Anthology of Poetry

Including both, some local boy (I'll go

With the assumption this artist was male)

Had taken the time to paint a rocket-fuel

Fart on a remote and mass-produced road

Sign. "Bullock sterteth, bucke ferteth,"

Sure enough. A little further on, a corpse

Of a bull elk, right-on-cue roadkill, sprawled

Where the driver had dragged it, I assumed,

On the right-hand rumble strip, and an eagle

Glared at me, golden-eyed, from a perch

On the haunch over entrails. Black Dragon,

Ghost Rock, Lone Tree, Salt Wash, Blood

Eagle. We know that our names never mattered.

The Haunting of Moab, Utah, 6 February 2017

The world was not a house without kindness
Never meant to be lived in, but neither was it
Intending any of the kindnesses it bestowed
On bemused and ever-hungry inhabitants.
It was haunted without concession to ghosts
Of design and purpose that that crept
Into the joins and moaned about the cold.
Perhaps it had formed itself. Surely nothing
Remotely like us could have formed it.
We held the only ideas it had, and suffered
For the infection. It did not suffer for us,
Though we swanned around its halls,
Banging and knocking and demanding,
Making fresh messes and scrubbing them
Out again, pretending to be stewards
When we weren't so much as guests, only
Maggots in the Aristotelian sense,
Spontaneously generated squatters.
Hunt the sheep, run the river, mine uranium,
Jump from the rocks with ropes attached,
We couldn't more than scratch the varnish
Always fading and regenerating anyway.
Anyway, the razored contrast line along
The empty blue and the crumbling rock
Props of the given palace was all the script
The palace itself had invented. No one here.

Bonfire of the Vanities, Castle Valley, Utah, 5 February 2017

I had not seen Danny and Oscar together
Since I took my family from Castle Valley
Almost four years earlier, the end of days
Spent in the quiet interrupted by the rare
Bark of a dog, cry of a peacock, rumble
Of a delivery truck down the only real road,
End of nights in the genuine dark enjoyed
By moon phases, planets and stars, graced
By the coyote howl, the owl, the scream
Of a mountain lion prowling the Rim.
Oscar took me to see the giant bus
He had bought to turn into a house,
Parked up a mud-gutted, juniper-scrub lot.
Danny built us a giant bonfire using debris,
Branches, and gasoline. We threw our tales
On it while the first quarter shone over
The ghostly La Sals and Castleton Tower
Wavered in the greasy haze of the fire.
Danny was going to AA. Oscar was solo
Battling the demon that had once led him
To nightly applications of a two a.m.
Chinese liver cleanse, whatever that was.
Throw that on the fire as well, flambéed
Memories of drunken nights and hungover
Days. Like all recoverers, they had stories
To tell, brawls in the bars, arrests at blood
Levels associated with blackout, still
Gripping the wheel of a car, the time
Danny almost lost his pilot's license,
The time Oscar stood mutely wetting
His trousers, too pissed to open his fly.
Our personalities don't change much,
No matter how much we throw on the fire.
We all cracked wise, cursed, and guffawed.
We all stank of woodsmoke next morning,
No matter how sober, and the sun rose
As stubborn as ever over our hopes and us.

Arches, Utah, 4 February 2017

Anyone with the tendency to wake up
With a sense of dread when and only when
Sleep was good and the morning without
Alarm will understand that I was not afraid
Because I had every good reason to be
Afraid, ashamed and filled with dread, but
Because I had slept well and slept in
On a day when I could. Sun in the borrowed
Bedroom, darkness in the debtor's thoughts.
This world a loaner is. The light, that light
Common in southeastern Utah, sharp
And dusty as new-mined diamonds,
Announced a new day never done before,
Same old probabilistic universe, same
Old fiction of a continuous life and self.
Time to make the bed and go to Arches,
Revisit the precarious balancing acts
Of ever-eroding formations of lifeless rocks.
Mustard and onion sandwich, handed over
After daughter ate out greens and turkey,
Chocolate and scotch, just a sip, for desert,
Then leaned out, back into the sun, out
Of sight from the trailhead parking lot,
And peered up a liquefied-looking wall
Of dissolving sandstone, in front of my nose.
Midday in paradise for the midlife disaster.
How long could body keep asking self
How long for body and self to be asking?
The parking lot raven detoured into junipers
To check out the possibilities I might offer.
I offered it nothing but my silent appreciation
Of its jackhammer beak, gleaming black
Feathers and confidence. You, friend,
I thought, basking in the sand and duff,
Are on a short lease of your own, but
There'll be no sin for you in leaving.

Mekheroteyhem, Utah, 3 February 2017

I could sing a shapely cosmos if I cared to, I said,

But silence forgets me at every breath, yes. Starlight,
Answered daughter, I like the name Starlight.
You could have named me that. Body protested,
But you had to exist, first, and grow up enough
To consult before I could have known your preference,
And even now, I know what you don't, what you won't
For a while, that preferences change. Once,
When I was eighteen, I fell in love with a catasterism
And fancied being known as Orion. Now,
If I had to pick, I would prefer something untranslatable,
Damn near unpronounceable, unknowable, at least
Unknown. Pretentious, I know, but that's because
While preferences evolve rapidly, character tends
To a relative stability, and my character ever dreamed
Of being rather more impressive than it knew it was.
Oh Papa, don't be silly. I still like Starlight, you said.
So do I, said I, meaning something else, meaning light.

Nameless, Utah, 2 February 2017

This view, or its ancestral forms in this approximate location,
Had risen up before me, again and again and again, and had
Many names attached to it like labels floating on the waves
Of falling sandstone, upwelling lava: Silver Reef, Red Cliffs,
Harrisburg, Snow, Pine. All the punctuation in the world
Could not make the scenario less liquid, nonetheless.
There were earlier names, and earlier, and at some point
Gone in the haze the first one, and before that, none.
There were earlier fauna and flora among the earlier boulders,
And earlier, and at some point gone the first tongue of lava.
It seemed like I knew this, as if I were someone who'd been here.
So recognition had once again deceived me. When I saw,
Earlier, the familiar colleague coming out of the other
Familiar colleague's office, I had a panicked, prosopagnosic moment
Knowing I vaguely knew the face but could not place the person.
Shame at not being able to participate in the fiction
That is all naming obscured from me for that moment
The truth that I was experiencing, for once, the namelessness.

Hidden People, Utah, 1 February 2017

A visceral hatred for the rules, for the way the world works,
And not for the beings mired in it, killing and eating,
That's an ethic at least a little worth considering.
Last night, Draco and Orion seemed to both be vying
To kill the crescent moon nestled between Venus and Mars.
Play me something more than silence at the apocalypse,
I asked an ethnomusicologist, but he refused.
In my skull, a hardanger undertoned fanitullen
While I hung on to the window and counted two hundred
Self-generated lights in the dark, glowing silently.