Above Wildcat Trailhead, Utah, 31 March 2017

Daughter had observed carefully the month
Had begun on a day of quiet weather
And now, like a good empiricist, was eager
To see if the claim, "in like a lamb, out
Like a lion," would be falsified. The forecast
Suggested some ambiguity. Which would be
More leonine, a big windy, sunny day or one
Of soft, intermittent showers? A stormy day
Or a splendidly calm, balmy day would be
Best, but neither was to be. In the event,
It was mild enough to rise high in the peaks
The afternoon before and to look down
On the clouds milling around like sheep
Infesting a meadow. Wolves being long gone
The mountain lion was the top predator
Not carrying a gun around these cliffs.
Metaphors trembled, settling their haunches
And surveying the innocent day down there.
Body could sense the rising hairs that said
Hard as it was, hunger could be patient,
And that sometimes it felt better to starve
A little while while waiting for lambs to come
Back into season again. I will, I must go out
Like a lion, I said to no one, quite cowardly.

City Lawn, Utah, 30 March 2017

Debating options over lunch in the park,
Body wanted to dodge the noose, but self
Cared more about the stocks. They scolded
Each other, endlessly. Why? The day
Was bright, the details of the buzzards'
Feathers sharp against a bare blue sky.
Something will punish you both in the end,
Observed puppet. What will remain?
The comparative quiet of the city park
Stretched itself out upon the watered grass.
Any intentional community is a garden, if not
A greenhouse, requiring relentless
Maintenance to stably exist. What I love,
Said someone who lived like a courier
Between body and self, puppet and soul,
Is the way the world returns to wilderness
On its own. Self sourly replied that was small
Comfort to the fruit trees lost to the forest,
And body pointed out that wilderness was
Only an uncontrolled number of gardens,
Each maintaining its own, competing. What
Would be a miracle would be only if
There were no need for maintenance nor
Punishments, no heaps of burning weeds,
No outcast dead, no exclusionary principles
At all but still a sense of being, many senses,
A community. Heaven and Eden, gates ajar,
Unpatrolled, Yama and Satan strolling,
Arm and arm today from Hell Mouth to invite
A few devas and angels to picnic on this
Unattended, unstruggling, unmowed lawn.

Accounting Firm, Saint George, Utah, 29 March 2017

At last, when here turned out to be there,
The one who translated yesterday's words
Into unusual utterances wondered
At the vapidity of numbers, when who
Controlled the numbers controlled the wars.
An owner in one context was ever a robber
In another, dying rebel warrior in a third.
Identity and quantity were dangerous
Demons and gods from the start. Pray
They stand a little apart from each other
When they stand on either side of you.
How did those twin pillars of smoke and fire,
Those djinns entwine in the air above
The desert of yesterday at nightfall, when
Countable stars in a measurable sky
Came out to decide if there were ever body
Or self to save, ever puppet or soul, owner
Or liar, if ever there were one here, in here?

Pioneer Names, Utah, 28 March 2017

That, right there, was the rest of my life,
Mosaic plague of darkness I could feel.
But let us be cheerful and kick up our heels,
I said to myself in the handsome canyon,
Watching a bighorn kid skitter down
Ten of thousands of fine layers of gone years
In spring. The kid did as instructed, fled,
And body smiled. Even self pretended to be
Contented. The barometer dropped as well,
And cliff cloud accumulations darkened
Promisingly. Why is it, when we are gloomy,
Facing embarrassments and failures, likely
Or merely imagined, we are more in love
With sudden catastrophes and start to hope
Every cloud on the horizon portends storms?
If the world burns, no one collects debts,
Sure, but wouldn't you rather have debts
Than burn to death? I studied the names
Of the early Latter-Day Saints who scraped
By through this desert unlike any home
Any of them had previously known. The end
Encouraged them, encourages anyone
Somehow to keep going, that sense it is not
My fault if it all falls, that sense it is not
In my hands whatever befalls, the sense it is
Likely to be decided correctly, fully, soon.
Then one by one our days went on, bodies
Ended, our burnt selves swapped among
The bodies left alive a few words, puppets,
Threadbare ashes torn to serve as ghosts,
And before you know it, there is no end.
You were; others are, maybe descendants
Among them, maybe uncaring strangers like
Me staring up at your scratched identities
Cloven-hoofed critters skitter across.

Marathon, Utah, 27 March 2017

If space and its geometries were metaphors,
I wondered, then what defined a marathon?
It was early in the morning, the hour before
Dawn, the hour that began Egyptian sundials
And doomed us to the duodecimal quotidian.
A couple of distant nuclear meltdowns,
Bright enough to pierce clouds and ambient
Village predawn lowlights, prinked the sky.
I was trapped in bed with someone's head
Snoring on my shoulder, body grumbled.
To kill the other person's fleeting dreamtime,
I stared out the window at what body's eyes
And brain interpreted as purple night, stars.
In a marathon, time cannot define the race,
Only the sequence of start and finish,
Winners and also-rans. The race is defined
By its distance. Run the distance, race is run,
No matter how "long" the time taken racing.
Surely, forty-two point one nine five clicks
Can only be construed as distance, only
Translated into the boggy mess of time
Quantified. But let's call time by its proper
Name, change, I whispered to myself
Immobilized in the dark. Change is as
Countable as the dimensions abstracted
From it, although every count of anything
Must be part fiction, part simplified. Change
This while holding that constant. Okay.
Nothing can be held perfectly constant, but
Close enough for our perceptions, yes.
Holding the route constant, the map true,
The potted plants on the tenement balcony,
The slope of Heartbreak Hill, the angle
Of the tarmac as the potholed ascent starts,
The crowds confined to the sidewalks,
Holding out cups of water and cheering,
The young and bizarrely involuted minds
Of the terrorist boys leaving backpacks
Behind, the starting gun, the finish line,
The skin of the planet beneath the stones
As the whole thing careens sideways,
Spinning, then of course, the course
To a first approximation resembles the truth
Because change, although everywhere
And everything, from itself also changes
And is not always the same, so that what
We call a line run through two places
Can exist, in a way, as a difference between
Change accumulating rapidly, acceleration,
And change compiled over eons, nearly
Stasis. The difference between time
And itself is geometry and when the bomb
Went off, I thought, it went off in a kind
Of cruelty to our belief we exist in space.
That was a long time ago, gruesome race.
Morning's stars gone from my mind, dawn.

In the Neighborhood Between Hope and Nothing, Utah, 26 March 2017

I couldn't help returning to the thought, what
If the world, the universe, is just exactly what
It seems to be? There is no unreality, only
The real; our perceptions aren't wrong, only
Limited, but sadly accurate as far they go.
Not that there would not be new discoveries
But the general tenor of the thing is fixed.
I picked a less-familiar stream to sit by,
One flushed by recent snowmelt and rain,
Brown and foaming in the bright spring day,
One of those little rivulets fixing to carve
Its own canyon of gravitas eventually.
To access a spot with some cottonwoods
And shade, I had to cross a subdivision
Of beige houses and slip between the brick
Gates of a named neighborhood. One gate
Had an empty circle, head-high, showing
Sky on the other side, and the other gate
Featured the same bricked hole but with iron
Lettering fit into the circle, HOPE, the name
Of the neighborhood. Empty sidewalks
Petered out and then a gutted dirt trail
Led down to the stream. Power lines,
Brush, and new leaves bobbed and swayed
In the rising, falling, rising breeze. This is
It, I thought. There are no alternatives,
No heavens or underworld hells, no outsides
To this singular universe, coextensive
With itself, differentiating into the distance
In all directions and each direction time,
No explanation ever to be had as to why
This and not anything other than this,
Just this with no reason to be but it is.
If you don't like it, the best and worst
You can say of it: whatever muddy bit
Of ripple you are in it is part of it, and thus
In some aspect of itself contemplating itself
This universe doesn't much care for itself.
The stream burbled on, the sound shifting
Its pitch too slowly for my hearing to know it.

Altar of Sacrifice, Utah, 25 March 2017

It was by restraint of hunger that Hermes
Made himself a god. Can you blame
Young women for wanting a share
Of divinity in their narrow frames?
Divinity or death, it's all the same to life,
Which is hunger, after all, as living
Is hunger served, eventually with the flesh
Of the hungry themselves, and never sated.
To exist and know of one's existence
Without having to feed, that is divine
Even if it's also the antithesis of immortal.
Insatiable life will always come back for more
So why not try to smile and look away
Until it's done consuming you? Not easy
Enough? Of course not. You must become
The main course. Be brave. No, I was never
An advocate for fasting, but I felt I should state
The scapegoat's conditions of escape.

Blue Gate Studio, Utah, 24 March 2017

A storm had knocked out the power for an hour

And battery-powered plastic faux candles

Lined the front of the small stage for footlights

While forty or fifty neighbors in their sixties

And seventies listened to the acoustic duo

Perform Dave Van Ronk's  "Losers":

From Ghengis Khan to the Fuller Brush Man

They're just a bunch of losers like me...

The friends and neighbors applauded

And hooted, then opened more wine

On the break. A six-year old girl and a four-year old

Boy chased each other around a cottonwood tree

Outside while the clouds purpled over Zion

And the wind picked up again, a little lightning

In the distance. When the next set began

It was time for the Blues, and the guitar-picker

Deadpanned of one song's long-gone composer,

"He died in prison, as all good child-preachers do."

When the power went on, another cheer.

Body sat in a folding chair, thinking of Van Ronk's

God, and nodded with the rain.

Past Road Closed, Kolob Terrace, Utah, 23 March 2017

Whatever happened to Jerzy Kosinski?
I hadn't followed the story, so I never knew
Until I happened on it yesterday in a book
Review. Time was, all a teenager knew
Was that this was a famous writer, important,
The kind one hadn't read but should,
The kind even an Ivy League university
Boasted to have on the faculty, the kind
Who wrote serious, satirical novels
That were turned into seriously satirical
Movies nominated for Academy Awards,
The kind famous photographers portrayed
For the covers of weekly newsmagazines,
That kind. There was an anecdote
In a feature at the time, describing Kosinski
As a teacher, how he once walked in late
To his morning literature class at Princeton
Where the students all sat dutifully, quietly
At their long wooden table-desks, waiting
Without a murmur, and he turned on his heel
Then returned a few minutes later,
The puzzled students still waiting patiently,
Strode to the front row and held out
A pocket mirror he had procured, under
The nose of a startled but silent young man.
Kosinski checked the mirror and announced,
"Good! I just wanted to be sure you were still
Living." The scenario appealed to a kid
Not in that class with that famous writer
But who had attended, fitfully, Princeton.
As a graduate student in Montana and later
Georgia, I sometimes retold the story, as if
I had been there. I thought it was funny.
It was an excuse to name-check Kosinski
And Princeton, to pretend I had been close
To something akin to celebrity genius.
I noticed, however, after a few retellings,
That the name Kosinski no longer resonated
With any newer college kids, and I dropped it
Without ever looking into it. I suppose
I assumed he had simply faded from fame,
Although by that time he was already dead,
A suicide. I'd only read a couple stories
Of his, plus that magazine feature. Vaguely,
It crossed my mind once or twice to wonder
Why his name could no longer conjure.
Come to find out finally, accidentally, scandal
Had demolished his glossy reputation.
He had lied, Munchausen-style, about
The horrific orphan past that had made him
Famous as much as had his books, and he'd
Used unpaid, uncredited assistants to shape
His much-praised English prose. Eerie,
If only because the greatness he'd been
Granted so easily sank without apology,
If not completely without a trace. Remember,
Children wishing to be great and near
The great, all of culture is the Trickster, not
Any one little tricksy liar inside. What culture
Says, it swallows, never any so grand nor
Minor but lying made and remade them so.

Dimes for Dementia, St. George, Utah, 22 March 2017

I let the tall trees swallow me. I was me
For a passage, and me was I. We waltzed.
You're welcome to place yourself in these
Shoes and prance around. Just imagine!
You too could be, are, were both I and me.
Now look, I said. The trees are blue. Clouds
Blossom in their branches. How strong
The trunks appear in our minds together.
Let's get lost in here. Blue leads to blue.
If we travel any further together, we'll all
Disappear. The pillars fill the compass rose
And we can't go wrong, not anywhere, I said.
There are always more gaps up ahead.

Almost Hopeless, Arizona, 21 March 2017

The engine revved and idled, compressing
The freon that then expanded to leach heat
From the surrounding air. The roar of water
Far below, however, was always louder
To body, which pleased puppet, who needed
White noise to safely vivisect the restive self.
In an allegory, puppet would correspond
To something either more tangible or more
Abstract, depending on which was the big
Idea. But this was an already hot afternoon
In early spring. Puppet was an evasion,
A jerky, jumpy, shadowy patch over the lost
Connections between soul, body, and self.
Puppet was the poem. Puppet was the error
Of my days. Puppet was the interference
Pattern created by the waves that made,
Down at the deadly bottom of the canyon
Among the roots and ants and rattlesnakes,
A sound louder to body than all the genius
Of generations rasping hoarsely through
Motors and compressors and words. I said,
To myself, when self cried out in selfish pain,
The operation is almost over. Hear the rain?

Drowned Houses Reservoir, Utah, 20 March 2017

And if I were not actually there, wherever
And whenever it was I said I was? Or it's not
True. I did not walk into the forest. The forest
Returned around me. I never knew trees
Could grow so fast or that I could breathe so
Slowly. In the event, the trees surrounded me.
By the time I noticed they were closing in,
They had ambushed me. It was so dim
At noon it was like being down a well,
Almost like being underground. Then, you
Could say, being you, once I started to move,
I walked in one direction, further in. Body
Was lost in the shadows of trunks, roots,
And branches. None of this made any sense.
I had never made any sense, rarely made
Nonsense, usually made only pretense.
There are two ways of getting lost
In the woods. One used to be real, but it's
Hard to do anymore. One was a secret.
I went out into a sunny, desert day
In the brilliant southwestern American spring
And sat down against a lichen-browned rock
And waited. Nothing much happened, but
Soon it began happening closer to nothing.
A tree muscled in, gnarled branches
Distending. Another. Another. Another.
Why did I wish to bear forever the noise
Of these, more than another noise close to me?
I was back in the world that never existed,
Where woods could be like water, and these
Were like deep, cold water curled around
My head, not pines, not flowering, not
Towering cedars or oaks. Night trees, trees
Of the night fall. I was walking underwater,
At the bottom of a wooded lake. Sunken
Limbs settled into my drowned houses.
You knew, you said, I was down here.

Under Prayer Flags in Zion, Utah, 19 March 2017

Body sat, glum in the sunny casita,
Discussing self and soul again with puppet.
Money and memory were my two deceptions
I offered to a world that valued both when I
Had neither but could make a convincing
Mistake. I was so unbearably easy to believe,
Unbearably easy for me. The fluffy fairies
Of numbers, ghosts, floated in the light.
Puppet danced. I wish I could be puppet,
Complained self, unnoticed in the corner
Despite being the topic of interminable
Conversation. Body shrugged and felt
Uncomfortable, as usual. No one knew
What soul had gotten up to, and no one,
Whatever the topic, really cared. The world
Readied to foreclose on the entire discussion
And diligently mailed notices to that effect.
Puppet kept dancing and chanted benignly,
I forgot what I was I going to say next.
I neglected another payment on the rent.
I shall sing as if I had money in the bank
And exact memories of each day in the tank.
A cactus spread its ugly arms beyond
The door ajar, living in the way body could
Only dream of living, selfless, soulless,
Free from art, conversation, and numbers,
A grizzled mess of spiny hairs on long stems
That did nothing but metabolize and grow.

Smith Mesa, Utah, 18 March 2017

Deer hunters drink the shittiest beer.
Discarded cans of Keystone Light bleached
By months of sunlight lay in the pine duff
Under a lone piñon tree The wind wound
Around the mesa and sighed a secret
Conviction about reality we all shared, I
Swore: we think we disagree virulently, but
Who swears to a vision or an alien infection
And who swears back that there's no such
Thing, agree, all unknowing, on one thing.
No, make that two things, two assumptions.
One, that there is such a thing as real and
Such a thing as unreal or less real at least,
No matter how furiously we spit at each
Other over which is which. And, two, that
There is an architecture to this dispute,
And the architecture, all unconscious half
The time, is this: the real is adjacent to, but
Always bigger and outside of, beyond
The less real, the game, the unreal. Even
To say that someone else's reality,
Someone's cosmology, choice of God,
Conviction of a parasitic alien infection,
Prey, ideal beer, is "just" a story is to say that
It's a game, a part of the lesser, smaller
Unreal world within the real. The hunter
Knows that the way to kill a deer is one
Thing and the way to celebrate is another,
And that the first is inarguably real, while
The second is a matter of morals, culture.
And that was the secret. We had evolved,
Like the first oxygen-dependent microbes,
Like the species who tolerated toxins
That protected them, clownfish, monarch
Caterpillars, et cetera, a tolerance, a buffer
For the rocket fuel of imagination, of story,
Of storytelling culture: we had a built-in
Reality distinction that came with our brains
And told us that some things were more real
Than others. This protected us, somewhat,
As organisms, from the effects of knowing,
But culture had its own tournament to win
And squirmed, true Morgellons, within us,
Just below the surface of our skin, writhing
To escape. So, I decided, under the junipers
Surrounding that deer-hunters' piñon,
Overlooking the locally insignificant red rock
Cliffs, listening to the wind sigh about this,
Pathetically anthropomorphically, as if
I might be convinced to take pity on it,
That I would take pity only on humanity
Convinced there was such a thing as more
Or less real, as lesser and greater reality,
A delusion that was different from truth.
And, being human and doomed to know
I was human and doomed, to the end, I,
The lesser fiction, lesser reality that was me,
Felt lonely. Ovid under a palm, Shakespeare
On an islet. Poets were supposed to know
Each other on sight, spontaneously, but
The greatest loneliness for a poet was not
Exile from humanity generally but to never
Befriend another, never arrive at a rival
Worthy of admiration, comparison, love,
Competition and quarrel. Did not have to be
Great, just well-matched. Better, in fact,
Well-matched than great because great was
A game the not-so-great played, badminton
With feathered skulls for shuttlecocks. So,
I was lonely. No one ever under this piñon
Like me, not of my kind, not like me. But then
I was not a poet, me, nor a hunter. I was Ishi,
The first of the unreal claims about me.

Courtyard Navigator, Springdale, Utah, St. Patrick's Day, 2017

The delirium of the birds in the fresh heat
Of a vivid blue-green day, the back yard
Like a photograph of Earth from near orbit,
Lizard crossing the Sahara of the court,
Painfully vivid, painful because all the detail
Betrayed no answer to body and puppet
Busy knitting another day's ghostly self
From nothing and nothing much: I gasped
For breath at the thought of being a bird.
Somebody somewhere was somebody else
Burning brush before the wind picked up, or
Bouncing an unseen basketball on the court
With a monotonous, clumsy intensity
Suggesting frustration. There we were,
You see? You would if you could see yourself
You old marionette of maintenance, hope,
And disappointment. You were, we were, we
All. A backbeat thumped around like a fish
Having a cardiac on the grass, then floated
Away, free, and escaped on the breeze. One
Caught between the too-many waves
And their obstacles that made the brackish
Backyard tidal zone of me longed to be
Already past the weir sun's afterimage
Left on the overwhelmed mind by fenced-in
Waves on waves on waves. Song, fish, beat,
Bounce, burn, bird, puppet scheming
How to be helpless but helplessly set free.

Wading in a Stream without a Ford, Utah, 16 Mar 2017

I was a bridge between the two worlds, but
With one dismaying problem, the realization
That the two worlds were one and the other
Worlds that might or might not be were
Utterly out of reach of my maker's light kites
And word strings and knitted cable ladders.
If, like John Mack, I'd been a bridge content,
I might have thought I led to something new.
Walk across me, and you'll see, the world
Beyond physical, wonders, mind the blanks.
But I was a boondoggle, a bridge to nowhere
That had always been aimed squarely there.
It was so quiet by the unabridged stream
That body could and did hear minor rockfalls
As well as the wings of a small bird, no
Bigger than body's two thumbs put together,
The first movement not water, rock, or fly
In an hour. Then it was gone. Another fly.
Then it was gone. Even in the night, nothing
Had come to the stream to drink, the only
Old tracks in the mud a few raven prints
And perhaps a fox or two, already vanishing.
What had come down to this impasse not us,
Yet, pots, shards, and dessicated cobs
In the canyons on either side suggested
Whole generations, villages had lived wholly
Or largely here, once, where recently only
The occasional jeep or ATV growled
A few minutes, ripping up the mud flats,
And then disappeared in search of other
Quiets to murder, other adventures.
Not even one of those so far today. The sky
With its etch-a-sketch contrails suggested
That air was easier to get across than here.
Here was never easy to get across, and yet
We all kept crossing it, I kept crossing it,
Knowing in time here must cross over me.

Big Muddy, Utah, 15 March 2017

It was so dark starlight glowed on the water.
I considered the time the photons crossed.
You know how you know a good thing is
An especially good thing? When its good
Effect on experience never diminishes.
Ordinary good things, like conversion
Ecstasies in tent revivals, passionate sex,
And alcohol are all tête-bêche, Janus-faced,
But the exceptionally good things go in one
Direction, one trend line over time,
Even when the plot scatters a bit in spots.
No matter how often I swam in the Slocan
I never habituated. Not every swim was
As profound. Some lacked the stamina
To reach those better, scarier depths
Where the mere fact of floating floated me,
But there was no gradual tailing down
Into boredom, obligation, or addiction,
Nor when I went into the canyons
And mountains to sit beside small streams.
I couldn't get enough of what never dulled
No matter how the sessions seasoned me.
Last night and this morning, despite
Mistakes, the endlessly looming loom
Of fate slowly toppling on top of me, despite
Daughter's alternations between delight
At playing in muddy water and complaints
At being so cold that this was "the worst
Camping trip ever," then more delight,
Despite shivering through sleepless moon
Hours in the wind-whipped tent as she slept
Snug in her pink cocoon bag with stuffies
Beside me, I found no diminution in the joy
Of an evening in a long valley of bare rocks,
The stream that could devour chuckling
Quietly, no other humans than us in sight,
In earshot, other than the occasional jet
Passing over us, joy in the darkness eyes
Could adjust to enough to pick a way
Around the campsite without lamps, and
Then the slow morning, the one bird
That woke, perfunctory as an alarm clock,
To sing and go silent again, a large world
Full of insignificance and long shadows,
Empty, in the end, of us, of body and brain
That made a world of it for us in the first day
Turning from light to light, relentlessly.

End-of-Winter-Maintenance Junction, Utah, 14 March 2017

Body and soul went up to the road that had for the past
Four months been closed by an upturned berm of ice, dirt, and snow
And found the remains of the berm removed, the road open.
For hope it felt symbolic, felt like possibility,
The giant ponderosas high and handsome in the sun.
Hardly half a mile later, the old roadside snows encroached
And then swallowed the pavement ahead. The tracks of horses
And ATVs wandered away from there and disappeared.
How far can you go? That's the only question the answer
To which body and soul would ever have wanted to know.

"Watch Blossom and Swiftly Kill," Tanner Amphitheater, Utah, 13 March 2017

I escaped, in a manner of speaking,
To a sequence in which my head was toward
The morning sun, my face had turned
To watch sheer, cracked rock walls with piles
Of highly similar sandstone boulders strewn
Across their exposed, more ancient knees,
And my ears, which I could not shut,
Were at least remote from most machines
And voices, open to the small birds
And the faint, beginning hum of bees
Warming up for spring. It was the nothing
Side of nothing much, leaning away from
The muchness. A distant passenger jet
Rumbled, and a mild canyon katabatic
Caused by the warming stones whisked
Through the brush, the juniper-piñon shawl,
With that husky hushing that always struck
Me as the least meaningful sound with which
World could taunt my meaning-sick
Mind, a hoarse whisper not even a ghost.
I glanced at the book in my lap, a summary
Of evils and injustices and entertainments,
The really meaningful things, concluding,
"And so the ghosts remained, without
Forcing a reckoning, without force at all.
The fact most wrongs never were righted
Some said was the reason for ghosts at all,
But I said there was only one wrong started
The rest and it had nothing directly to do
With murder or knowledge or any human fall,
No, not a consequence of those, but a kind
Of cause, a core correlative, a precondition,
The wrong that guaranteed all the others,
Meant hurt would come and stay to haunt
More wrongs unrequited. It was that there
Was any wrong, there could be wrong at all.
From that condition, nothing could further
Fall because, given wrong was along, it was
All ghosts from then on, packed solid,
Sighing and moaning, furious and helpless,
Making no difference, all the way down and
All the way out, echoing around the same
Sealed cell walls, the same high, closed
Vaults of heaven's domed skull halls."
The natural amphitheater, sized to human
Bodies as human hands to barely visible
Mites, expanded in the warming day,
An upturned palm, creased, pointed fingers
High as towers, cupping specks of flowers.

Profound Springdale, Utah, 12 March 2017

I didn't want to complain I had wasted
My own body, body's afternoon,
Or daughter's time. The day had been open
And warm for the season and begun
Well enough with a jaunt through Zion
To drop off a hiker on the far side, then
A return along the winding, handsome route
To town for a brunch of waffles and eggs.
Thought we'd stay home for a couple
Of hours, the day being free, and then go
Out again into the physical world but
Somehow the sociocultural kept us
In thrall, in the house, and yet dually lonely.
I didn't want to complain because it could
Have been body's fault much as anyone's
And because it couldn't really matter past
The next few hours to say we had not spent
The last few hours heroically, could it?
On a wicker chair listening to birds sing
For whatever reasons they do, I inhaled
A gust of spring, the pings and rumbles
Of a tourist town almost in full swing,
And worried about daughter glued
To her shows inside. The world will end
But at the last, parents will be concerned
About the quality of their children's lives
Or at least the quality of their children.
A breeze crossed the yard, a table saw
Whined, a dove moaned, and a dog barked.
Unfinished my thought and went back inside.

Quail Creek Reservoir, Utah, 11 March 2017

One boat floated, outboard idling in the sun
Across the big shallow puddle, orthogonal
To the vector I'd taken when I swam across
That bathtub-tepid, early-October water
Two-plus winters ago, though none of those
Jet skis I dodged then would have bothered
My trajectory were I to try it again today.
Today was March, mild for fishing, cold
For splashing around, although I was longing
And half-tempted to make the attempt,
Remembering the clambering in and out
Of the soupy green mud and grasses
As moderately disgusting but the middle
As reasonably clean and clear. That was
Then, what everything becomes by coming
Into being at all, then. Now, I could see
The migrating waterbirds, herons or cranes,
Remaining out in that clear area, a cloud
To themselves, even though I was sure
They must also sometimes stalk the shore.
Back when body was swimming out there
And, head down, listening underwater for
The deadly thrum of the pleasure engines,
Daughter had stayed playing by that shore
And caught, as she often does, a frog. So,
There must be something in this reservoir
For those waterbirds, but for today they had
Stayed where I would have stayed if I could,
Where I would have gone this day if I could,
Far out in the middle, hard to identify, hard
To scare, drifting calmly, at ease in the clear.

Unknown Soma, Arizona, 10 March 2017

Whatever immortality was, it couldn't have
Been as wondrous as the early praise hymns
Made it out to be. People with a hold
On a miracle might have been forced
To share with other people, by other people,
But would have been unlikely to lose it.
Accept no substitutes for the one true God,
I was often told, but a variety of candidates
For the title, a passel of somas and haomas,
Ahuras and devas, angels and devils,
And prophets and buddhas and saviors
Made me suspect that those who told me
To accept no substitutes were all peddling
Substitutes they'd accepted. Still, down
Among the prickly pear and Mormon Tea,
Knowing nothing I could ingest, nor fungus
Nor moonflower nor peyote, would do
The full divinity, I wondered about true soma,
What it might have been, what imaginations
Made of it based on the weak medicine
The actual world offered them: unknown
And argued over to the day I thought
Of it among the Arizona weeds, what a drink
That actually did come in the form of deity,
That transformed suffering into ecstasy, life
Spent dying into immortality, what a dream
Capable of everything the hymns sang of it
Would mean for present company. I stood,
Who could barely rise, into sunlight and said,
I have gone to the light, I have got the gods,
I have been set free in wide space, I have
Extended my life through sky and space,
I have summoned my helpers and shone,
As the hymn translators have written for me.
A soulful cow with a tag on each ear nearly
Stumbled over me, my body and immortality.

Borrowers Roost, Utah, 9 March 2017

I would have preferred to be excitedly 

Narrating near-miraculous details of the day

I was rescued from myself and this world

By this world itself, but I settled for the usual

Quiet moment stolen by the lurking stream.

(I might have written purling for a bit

Of tongue-in-cheek allusion, but I made 

A mistake and then decided I liked lurking

Better, as being more appropriate to both

The compositor of the words and the stream

That hugged the deepest canyon shadows. 

Ah, a mistake. What a fantasy inherited

From my many thieving ancestors, whether

Of spiral-fractured bones or the wordy spirit.

We wanted to believe we made mistakes.

We wanted to be told we could make them

Because then the consequences would

Prove our decisions were of consequence

To our worlds, a necessary if not sufficient 

Precondition for control. Otherwise, we just

Didn't matter, and it felt better to be guilty

Than impotent, utterly irrelevant even to us.)

When no one could be looking, I removed

My borrowed thoughts and phrases, out

Of my hand-me-down bone and leather purse,

And arranged them neatly in front of me,

Where I could count and reconsider them.

In the copse across from my rocky perch,

Cows chewed their cud and kept their wary,

Dark, wet eyes on me. They could look.

I wasn't afraid of further retheft from them,

But I kept a wary eye myself on the ravens.

What little, well-worn, thumbed-soft trinkets

Could I reassemble as if I had anything left

To barter with, being penniless and bereft 

Of a persuasive sense of responsibility 

To my extended human family? Awful man,

Always turning his blind eye inside, his good

Eye focused on his own navel or lap. Memory

Increasingly abandoning me, I sighed

And piled a cairn of the baubles I'd taken,

Me, bowerbird flirting with an angry God.

The stream, sounding anthropomorphically

Contented, sang to me. A cow lowed 

At nothing in particular that either one of us 

Could see. Instead of reordering any more 

Of these dull ordinaries, these vacancies,

I began to doze over my remaining trove,

And the waves and the brain flowed together

To lull this infected mind, once full of chuff,

Now lowering, emptying, Borodin's Notturno

Winging the water-marked vault of skull.

Defiance, Utah, 8 March 2017

I was an overbold sophist as Zeus might say,
Lightning bolt twitching in his godly fingers.
But why waste any display of power on me?
I'll go anyway. I'll go quietly. The only issue
With any tiny cynic is that one might expose
The God as one of the true believers' night
Sweats, if you know what I mean. I was weak
As anything, but I wasn't claiming to be
Strong. Strength must prove itself and can't,
Can only demonstrate that the weak we
Knew were weak were weak, as if that
Proved the strength of the prover as well
As the proof. No such luck. Khan may mow
A million down, but Khan will still go down,
And even that famous, forked-lightning
Chromosome of his will go down eventually
Or at least when the whole species exits
As species always do. No one is strong,
Not in this universe; no king can hold against
The merest tide, nor can the tide hold
Against the moon, nor the moon, any moon,
Against the end of orbit. So I was wrong
To thumb my nose against the fantasists
Of heaven, but they were not long, either,
For a cosmos so much vaster than them
That they counted as creators of everything
For no time in the scheme of things, nothing
Much in the kingdom of the ever-shifting.
So I sang and felt triumphant, defiantly.
The next minute my eyebrows were singed
And I knew the temporary deity could not
Bear to humor such as me. So I'll go quietly.

Timeholder, Confluence Park, Utah, 7 March 2017

An expression is when you say something
But you actually don't really mean it, said
Daughter to friend in the car on the way
To another day of kindergarten. Close
Enough. Things shift. A carapace
Forms from every bloodied bit of skin
And pulls away eventually. Once, we meant
More or less what we thought words meant,
Then the whole shell of the phrase stiffened
And pretty soon it was a leathery token
Being tossed around, an expression.
Happened again and again, sometimes
By contraction, sometimes by extension.
Take place away from placeholder, which
Could be any kind of bookmark, thing to sign
A pause in process. By analogy, make a new
Term, timeholder. As a placeholder tries
To indicate a caesura in an action to be
Continued, rather than simply a place per se,
So a timeholder could be the magical
Reverse, a gap in actual space, rather than
Simply a moment per se. I parked
On the rutted road, the side grasses lightly
Littered with occasional cans and bags,
The trucks chuntering on some project up
In the distance, the odd ATV or dirt bike
Roaring through the scrub nearby, the sky
Blue high, hazed with fine spring dust
And mixed with pollen closer to the ground.
I got out to listen to the dwindling
Stream meandering below me. It hummed
Universal law, one presumed, liquid
Surface tension insufficient to keep
The water from sliding in snaking coils
Down the geometry of gravity. Fair
Enough. I tried to imagined an actual gap
In things, a way to mark, to save my time
Right when I left it, but I could not do it
Because the thin skin of my thoughts
Kept tearing away from the healing wound
They sealed for me. When was it I stopped
Being here and became somewhere, not
Counting this? It was just an expression.

Shaddai the God, Empty Garden, Utah, 6 March 2017

No one even knew what the name meant,

Where the word came from, exactly, 

Nor how. Could have been etymologically 

Related to fertility or to mountain, shaddai,

But one would have to admit, hard pressed,

There's a considerable range between

Those conceptions, and no traditions 

Linking the two explicitly, the way, say,

The Chinese Dao, the Latin Spiritus exhaled

Along lines glowing with significance, sung

To core metaphors like plucked strings 

Vibrating. Could have meant something else

Entirely, which, sitting in my bare garden

On a grey windy day in the liminal season 

Between meteorological and astronomical 

Pronouncements of official spring,

Waiting for the usual vision, that wonder

That could save me temporarily from being

So increasingly temporary, I rather liked.

I liked the idea of an earlier name for the God

Who roared at excuse-making Moses

To get going, while by-the-way explaining, 

As if Moses or anyone had asked Him,

Your forefathers knew me as someone else

But I'm really Me, and I'll stick by My word

That I gave under another, mysterious name

That no one will know in a few thousand 

Years or so. It was a nice piece of editing,

Retroactive splicing of then-known traditions

By the priests, I guessed, but neither here

Nor now. No. I preferred to keep the dark,

Vague mystery of it as a blunt unknown,

That there was a name for this God we know

That was truly ancient, truly local, truly

Lost, like us and all our dreams of divinity

Rooted down under belief's composted duff,

And that that name was more sayable, but

Vivid, specific, and terrifyingly uncontrolled.

Round Pond, Crooked Mouth, and Dark River, New Jersey, 5 March 2017

This wasn't the writing I dreamed of

Writing, but it was the writing I wrote.

My mother, a New Englander, half-orphan,

Raised on an inadequate subsistence farm

During the Great Depression while 

Her oldest brothers dropped out of school

To find work in the dwindling timber,

Understandably swore by her family's 

Quasi-Calvinist form of Evangelism

For eighty-odd years, despite a deep,

Natural, skeptical streak about everything

Other than the KJV. They saved their own

Lives, those family members, true believers,

And that could not be questioned. When

She married the dissolute, crippled son

Of a descendant of the first Dutch settlers,

Down in what became New Jersey,

She converted him and kept a tense

Distance from the socially inclined

Dutch Reformed church of his mother. 

When she gave birth to her first-born,

In her mid-thirties, a nurse herself, it was

In the memorial hospital located

Directly across the street from the Dutch

Reformed Church of Pompton Plains,

A building itself nearly two centuries old

And sprouted from a land purchase made

By her husband's ancestors another

Century or so before that. The landscape

Around the highways and subdivisions,

Dying factories and scraps of old farms

There, like the landscape around her 

Childhood, remained strewn with toponyms

Left over from the indigenes her husband's

And her own ancestors had fought with,

Bargained with, converted and exploited:

Ramapo, Pequannock, Pompton, so on.

So I grew up in the most banal of American

States, thinking it was a unique, local trait.

But I'll tell you, if you promise to keep

Reading: everything is nothing much;

Everything is equally banal and boring

Or not, at the time of its experiencing. There

Were Lenape, distant relations of the Seneca

That would later interweave their dwindling

Opportunities with my mother's missionary

Forebears further north, who walked around

These old parts where their language would

Remain like Borges' scraps of rotten maps,

Outliving their world's collapse. For them, 

An ordinary day before the Ryersons came

With wampum from New Amsterdam, before

Even the earliest sailing ships of scurvy

Reconnoitered the coast a long walk away,

Its sun and its birdsong, its green springs 

Were as ordinary as they'd ever been

And one wondered rather about one's own 

Fortunes in that context, one's offspring,

Without likely thinking, This is so romantic!

One day all these woods and all my tribe

And all my offspring will be gone, no

Matter what I think on today while I repair 

Familiar weirs along this same old stream.

Ghost Pine, Midnight, Zion NP, Utah, 4 March 2017

I didn't want to write about a lot of lives.
I understood the novelists' urge, I liked
Novels, plays, shows, and movies. But I
Knew that, however legion and polyglot
That solitary English pillar, I, body only
Lived one life, with all the others folded
Up inside and dying all the time. So I
Didn't want to pretend I could extend
Over generations of I's, over braided
Rivers of genes and genealogies, lies
About blood and origins, beginnings
And ends that could never be mine.
I served to be a slave to my limitations
So that I could study, maybe understand
What limitation meant. It didn't mean
Only that other bodies were mean, however
Much they were, and they were, of course
They were. It didn't mean the history
Of patriarchs or a people, of belief, although
Belief was tied up in it like breath is tied
Up in blood for us, for bodies like ours.
It meant, here, here I was, tangled
And dangling, descended from billions
Of bodies and thousands, at a minimum,
Of tales, but only caught here, in this tree,
Upside down and laughing manically,
Then pretending to be dour and severe.
Rules and laws were never really either,
But it was true, and you might as well know
It will be true for you, if you're you, that
I was attached to the body that dreamed
As it dangled and changed, confined
By the surprise that the tiniest puff of air
Was always different but that the ghost
That haunted the changes was much the same.

Subway Trailhead, Utah, 3 March 2017

What could you need to know of the way

Things were behaving today in this corner

Passage of the constantly dissolving 

Universe? Redundancy, similarity, and

Continuity, like being, living, and knowing,

Like fear, hope, and nostalgia, like emptying

The water under the land, the rivers

That surface on the land, the hot springs

From deep in cool canyons, like wool,

The poor, and chastity, like purity,

Victimhood, and noise, like these

Quick-lidded waves, their wink, and 

This wry face, like the transformation,

The yearning, and the awareness, like

The light on the trail when I began, the light

Left among the canyon shadows just

Passing now, and the light that will burn

My eyes when I turn around to face the low

Sun that will pinion my lumbering return,

Offer a single mystery that trinities, like all

Stories with beginnings, middles, and ends,

Only begin to tent peg. Everything changes

But something stays the same. Not some

Thing. No thing stays the same. Nothing

Stays the same. But there is something

That remains and refuses to be named.

Can you hear the water that I heard

Rushing past the trail, far from the most

Promising portions, always out of reach

For Moses? Leonard Cohen sang hineni

Just before he died because, he said,

We all have an instinct to serve, even if

We don't know what the hell we should be 

Serving. Yes, here I was, reader, unable

To articulate the emergency that might

Rescue someone like you, like you, you,

And you. I loved the sound of the water,

Loved it, but could not follow it through.

Little Black Train, Toquerville, Utah, 2 March 2017

One black-barked dogwood already went
White by the time that I drove by yesterday
Afternoon in the hard sunshine. Strange
Little town, houses lining the old main route,
A double row of American flags in the wind,
Like motley families crowding a parade,
The dowdy, the overdressed, the plain,
The ones with boarded-up eyes, the lit,
The sprawling and mostly the small, some
Built of black basalt boulder cobbles
Pockmarked by bubbles when they cooled
However many thousand years ago then
Formed the overhanging slopes that still
Seem to threaten to flow down over town.
Ugly, really. Ugly local stories, too.
A couple of years ago, a boy murdered
The elderly woman he'd done chores for
For years, stealing her purse and car, then
Getting caught and hauled out shrieking
From his girlfriend's parents' trailer
By the river a few days later. Last month,
A father arrested for maltreatment
Of a child kept locked up, malnourished
And in filth, just a few months after
The child's mother had lost custody
Because of her gross neglect. Kind
Of town, one imagines, only Shirley Jackson
Or David Lynch could love. Dock Boggs
Sang "Little Black Train," and I waved
To the flags and the dogwood in passing.
Next week all the cherries, plums, and other
Dogwoods will cloud the dour house-fronts
With pink and white blossoms, and if
The train hasn't left yet nor the monster
Under the hill started moving after its long,
Long nap, I may drive by a few times more
To see that floral boulevard and smile.

Lion Boulevard, Utah, 1 March 2017

I had nothing against prayers. I had spent
Half my life inventing them. It was impossible
The day before to say for sure how March
Would begin. The road past the library,
Cemetery, community center, tennis courts,
Recycling station, holding pond, entrance
To the outdoor auditorium under the cliffs
Is called Lion for a local reason. Cougars
Have been known to pounce on pet dogs
As well as deer, and joggers have felt
The hairs on their necks stir at twilight
When the evening stars open golden eyes.
Doesn't mean anything to do with weather.
My neighbor liked to own and paint lambs
As well as chickens and pigs, rustic things
That had to be protected long enough
For us to decide what to make of them.
How many millions and millions of humans
Have been raised to think of themselves
As lambs, to pray for protection ambling
Through the long, long valley of the shadow
Where it's the absence of the eerie scream
Announcing the presence of the predator
That is passing the time, waiting, we should
Fear? Every ending has a name. No name
Ever names the ending. Impossible to say.