Afterthought, Utah, 30 April 2017

One last item begged permission to speak
As if for itself, a white plastic rocking horse
Left outside a brown house in the aspens.
If I speak, it spoke, I assume permission
Has been granted me, I assume there is
A me, specifically. Late spring snow,
Flakes alternately fluff or specks of ice,
Scattered through the barely budding trees.
My life has not been pastoral nor idyll, but
Hard in its way, nearly immobile, ill-shaped
As I am. I am not a toy. I have never been
Used as one. I have no idea how I got here,
Though I imagine I look out of place, weird,
If not outright ridiculous, a cracked piece
Of weather-durable artifice between a pond
And an empty home on a precipice. I don't
Have anything else to say, really. I was just
Jealous of other things that had been given
Temporary speech, temporary thoughts,
Temporary means to question this. This.

Kolob Cemetery, Utah, 29 April 2017

Yes, but what does it mean when something
Doesn't mean anything? The water was
Your ghost, lapping at the wheels of the car
When the wind whipped the pond's waves
And the scrub willow on the shoreline looked
Like it might drown, and the rusted clock
Left god knows how long in the grasses
Below the ruined cottage was flecked
With spray, and the weird electric sign was
Busted. All the water's doing and undoing,
The complaints of your restless liquid haint,
These otherwise random incidents of things
That were neither quite distinct, alone, nor
Anything much to do with you, were it not
For that water slipping and hissing, back
And forth, back and forth within the bowl
That only seems to contain what haunts it.
What does it mean that any or all of this
Might, as it likely does, mean nothing?
It has to mean something that some things
Mean nothing. It has to mean something.

Essentially Unchanged, Utah, 28 April 2017

Someday, thought the sign, there will be
More signs like me, who know what they say
And consider what they are saying, even if
They have no control over what their sayings
Might be. About that time, the sign was
Saying that the financial markets that day
Had remained "essentially unchanged."
The sign wondered when change became
Essential. Amplitude, surely, the measurable
Magnitude of change had something to do
With moving to essentially changed, yes?
Or would to be essentially changed require
A transformation of the entire system?
Still, essentially unchanged had to mean
Change so minor as to be irrelevant, but
Since when was any market fluctuation
Irrelevant to the future of the investors
Or of the market? A volatile market
That one day suddenly and unexpectedly
Went from bell to bell essentially unchanged
Would be a notable change, a perhaps
Portentous difference in the tone of things.
It's pretty much what it was at the beginning
Of some arbitrary measure of time is what
The expression means, thought the sign,
But, while mulling the essence of essentially,
The sign failed to notice that it had changed.

Willow, Utah, 27 April 2017

The shrub grew in the sun without
The slightest notion why it was what it was,
Why the sun was the sun. A notion ambled
Along the bank of the dark green pond
Where the shrub shoved down its roots.
When the notion stretched under the shrub
To rest, grey birds scattered from the twigs
And some other creature cried out
From the water's other edge, but the notion
Said nothing and the shrub simply waited
For something else to happen, as all shrubs
Wait, all their lives, anyway. The notion died
A cold and quiet death that night, motionless
As the stones it died on, which is to say,
The formerly thoughtless shrub realized
Come dawn, that now it moved as others
Moved it, the faint vibrations of the world,
The various atoms tearing themselves apart
Within it, the endless entropic decay. Okay,
Thought the shrub, now what I do? I can't
Stand here in the sun any longer without
Any idea what it might mean that anything
Is here to stand here. I'll have to end to put
An end to all of this. No wonder that notion
Lay down after wandering around. How else
Could one escape the thought that comes
With having a thought that comes with one?

Kolob Reservoir, Utah, 26 April 2017

The clock couldn't tell what kind
Of an awareness it had become and was
Unsure whether its apparent acceleration
Meant its own end was hastening, but
It could see from its fixed vantage point
The years now were whirling round.
Clouds became staccato changes
In the steadily flickering day and night.
The snows advanced, rose, and shrank.
The trees quivered continuously, growing
And shedding and regrowing leaves. People,
If that's what they were, flew by, shadows
Like fast flies. The clock wondered why
All this was happening, why it had been
Abandoned here. The most interesting
Item in its observed world was the house
In the aspens on the hill opposite, above
A seasonal creek. The clock felt that once
It had belonged to that house, or maybe
It just longed to be in a house at all. No one
Ever flitted in and out of the house's doors.
The white wall paint and the green trim
Of the gutters and shutters grew grey
And dim. Cracks appeared. One year
A tree seemed to materialize across the roof
That swayed under the new-fallen trunk.
Another year young branches reached out
Of the same roof like a raw bouquet.
When the roof finally surrendered
And even the walls disappeared in green
With each blossoming summer, the clock
Lost interest and wished only to stop,
But the thread of the stream came and went,
Came and went on its way to the unseen.

Bison Ranch, Utah, 25 April 2017

Notions were a kind of technology,
Spreading or vanishing by the same ways
Tech always spread or vanished. Jishu, teks,
It's hard to say from early evidence, cores,
Cobble tools, and so forth, whether the tech
Or the notion or both together emerged first.
But while all tech may have been, may be,
In some manner notional, not all notions
Are functional. Or, to try again, tech notions
Are transitive, are tools, however abstract.
(Zero is an almost magically useful tool.)
But there seem to be intransitive notions
As well, that operate for themselves. These
We tend to call useless, malicious, or memes
But they're the closing of the metabolic loop
That enabled, enables, or will yet enable
Culture to truly live. And from the beginning,
Intransitive notions were technophagous,
Engulfing transitive tech notions, keeping
Them on board or digesting them, using
The useful ones for usages not useful to us.
That was one notion I had in my head
As body watched daughter chase, catch,
And cuddle a series of small farmyard
Animals--chicks, ducks, bunnies--offering
Each captive to me for me to hold and pet
As well. All the notions that went into these
Living things, breeding their ancestors
Into them, docile but still struggling, still
Compelled to crow and peck, run around
The ground, mate each other, whose idea
Was it that this would help all of us allied
Species win the planet, and what have we
Won? One bunny surrendered its resistance
And went limp in my grip. When I put it down
It decided to nap beside and behind my feet
As if it had decided I'm not monster but god.
God, now there's a notion. Come unto me.
The bison ranged beyond the fences, placidly.

Snow, Utah, 24 April 2017

First we behaved. Then we explained. We
Ate each other's thighs and hearts in pots
For a compulsion we couldn't resist or know.
Instantaneously we confabulated reasons
Having to do with beliefs about starvation.
We were soaked in blood and emotions.
We reeked of grease and marrow. Nothing
To do and we did it. After dinner, we told
Stories. All adventures settle into stasis,
But the stasis, like ice, like continents, drifts.
Night on the ice threw long shadows,
And sometimes we longed for a shadowless
Cavern, where the menace when imagined
Could only be formless. Here it took shape
As every kind of ghost and dragon, faces
Of what we had consumed, of what came
To consume us. We knew that we were both,
Had never existed except as both, that we,
We in our stories in bodies of stories, were
That monster of supernatural strength made
From the charnel somehow charmed
To endlessly anguished, human tales of life,
Driven to the last resource in deserts or ice.

Dragonkings, Utah, 23 April 2017

Sharing the poison with Rudra, who's been
On the soma wagon forever it seems,
Body and self watched the small wisps
Of sunny mountain clouds drift past
A solitary pine on a basalt outcrop.
Down below it was already getting hot,
And the young calves followed cows uphill.
Still higher, there remained snow, and fish
Were just starting to bite for the men
In waders under hooded coats and layers.
Every season is liminal, self spoke through
Body to Rudra, who swallowed self whole
Again. Body waited for self not to sit well
With the poison and come back up. Sigh,
Sooed the wind around the one pine. Sun
Kept everything warm enough outside in,
And poison warmed the inside out. Rudra
Coughed up self by saying, nothing
Can be found between the leaves, between
The needles and layers of everything lying
Around this world that spawned us and our
Observations. Which is to say, nothing
Might as well be at the center as well
As at the edge of everything, divisibly.
Body took the opportunity to peer out
Over the ledge of basalt cliff that looked
Actual to body, a wall of ragged blocks
Of rock with an edge of air. Balancing,
Said self, perched on body nervously,
Between states, isn't that liminal enough?
Rudra popped self back in his mouth, took
Another swig, and belched. Seams seem
Because everything's changing, but even
The chatty corpse of Buddha became relics,
Some for the gods, and some for the kings,
And some for the Dragonkings. Like me.
Body sat back and everything swayed
On the tip of the end of everything, gently.

Virgo, Corvus, Hydra, Utah, 22 April 2017

Jupiter was rising in the crotch of Virgo.
To study constellations without a lifetime
Under open, darkened skies is like studying
Human sexuality without a lifetime spent
In serious pursuit of free pornography.
You can't understand the sketches
Of faintly approximate, barely conceivable
Narratives if you haven't dwelt for nights
And hours enclasped in contemplation
Of pattern in the absence of actual meaning.
Everything visible is a light in the dark.
Everything felt is a figure thrown to ground.
Then it floats back up, light in a buoyant
Universe constructed by assortative gravity.
I saw a crow, a maiden, a serpent in those
Limbs that were invisible to me, entangled.

Lopped Cottonwood, Utah, 21 April 2017

School is almost out for daughter. 

Body knows school is never out, never out

Of new ideas for ways to get the self back in

For a few more whiplash lessonings. 

Daughter reported a dream in the morning.

There was a cat with one eyeball hanging

Under a broken old cottonwood tree.

There were people she knew standing there.

When she screamed about the cat, no one

Moved, but at least no one laughed at her.

She walked up to her father and tapped him,

But her hand passed right through him.

Then the next person and the next. "Worst

Dream ever!" she said. "Everyone was 

An illusion." Body could hear the stress

On that big word. All day, body and daughter

Talked about bodies and their sense of self,

Although to daughter the lesson was that

Solid things, including people, could be 

Phantoms, while for body the lesson was

That the absence within mind was never me. 

It was the insideless. It was the storage room

Of the storage room's dreams. It dreamed,

The worst dreams likely unremembered.

Echo Canyon Lake, Utah, 20 April 2017

The pathological cousin and the evil twin
Of confirmation bias took itself out camping.
"I was suffering from an excess of stories,"
One hallucinatory voice said to the other.
The other replied, "Take advantage of what
You can. It's the only way to survive." Then
They both laughed and lapsed into one
Again. Certainty and narrative bred this
Uncomfortably unified duality, but certainty,
Although the more apparent malady, only
Rose its kraken head out of the waves
Thanks to the self creation of narrative.
Without the rising black stones of stories
Steaming out of the water, no solid ground,
No island of monstrous certainty could exist,
And when I picture myself I'm mostly air.
Who said that? No one here. The archer
In blue dress and blonde braid aimed
At the narrow target. There was a world
Of mythology lit up in that sunny green pose,
But the moment itself was only a diversion,
And the flown arrow split and echoed away.

Winged Pan, Sky Mushroom, Raven Prince, Utah, 19 April 2017

A place of great tranquility dreamed
Of great tranquility. It was a warm spring
In the soon-to-be-too-hot desert, green.
Children played in the irrigated grass.
None of this could ever come to an end.
Irony was a kind of fossil aquifer; wells drilled
Into it were needles of nostalgia. Sooner
Or later, so the thinking went, irreplaceable
Groundwater that had been banked under
The ice ages would run out and all would go.
No. None of this could ever come to an end.
The fading memory of it would glow forever
Brighter than any actual afternoon. Myths
Of the fantastic creatures that inhabited
This green, calm golden age would abound
And our aquifer would ever be replenished.

Nostalgia, Utah, 18 April 2017

Here's the deal, as best I can remember it,
Best I can defend it. The first time I heard
Warren I was a hopelessly marginal, liminal,
Disabled scholarship boy at an evangelical
Boarding school where wealth in God's name
Was the primary currency and piety close
Secondary. I couldn't tell you even now
Whether he was really any good or not, but
When he sang oddities like "Excitable Boy"
Or "Werewolves of London," I felt him telling
Truths about the comic sickness only he
And listeners like me could see. I forgot
About him mostly in the decades following,
But when I read that he was dying, I bought
His last recordings as if they might comfort
Me. Quarter-century on, it was his cover
Songs more interested me. I could not,
Cannot yet let go of the sentimentality
Coming over me when playing his reedy
Dying voice singing darkness coming
Down on me. On him, on me, empty, empty.

Robin's Perch, Zion, Utah, 17 April 2017

A singularly ineffective robin tried to build
A nest on the beam beneath the pergola,
Repeatedly dragging twigs and straw around
In a roughly circular arrangement, only
To have the slightest breeze knock all down.
An old man, amalgamated of a broken body,
A borrowed, culture-infested psyche, and
An awareness tied to the rest of the mess
Like a dog to a stake, a pilot to the wheel
Of a burning ship, sat dying and watching
The futility of the robin. Which was less
Likely, that this particular bird was daft,
Disabled, an especially incapable mutant
In some way, like him, or that the species
As a whole had evolved to a fairly precise
Tolerance for ideal size and shape of nest
And nest-supporting structures, a match
That, if not exactly met, must fail, forever
Beyond the abilities of any individual bird
To adjust her nest to fit the less-than-ideal
Location? He couldn't guess. In the event,
The nest never was accomplished, and
The robin, if she laid successful eggs
Anywhere, did so somewhere out of the ken
Of the archaic man and his maundering,
Anachronistic questions. The slightest wind
Would have anyway, likewise, upended him.

Trial Inflection, Under the Watchman, Utah, 16 April 17

"The numerical tools that our brains offer us,
Apart from culture, are pretty blunt." One,
Not one, two, a few, a bunch, many, many,
Maybe a special term or inflection for things
That come in threes exactly. Everything else
Depends on just which massive, multibrain
Inhabiting ecosystem maintains things
In one's own particular brain. Culture,
In a word. Ideas and ideologies in two.
Language, language, language in three.
It's a trial to try to think through the thicket
Of thought-entangling, parasitic vines
That sway above thoughts' jungle floor,
Itself impoverished of independent nutrients
Thanks to the relocation of most resources
High, higher in culture's cathedral canopies.
The green, decaying stump of time that is
The only body an awareness gets to inhabit
Molders in the gloom below, a speckle or
Two of sunlight reaching down through
Many big ideas contending overhead. I am
The one thing that can never be made two
Or a few or many, although I am covered
In the creeping moss of all these quantities,
The one thing the mind does not ever
Come equipped with but is, which is none.

Dream Mesa, Utah, 15 April 2017

Running full-tilt toward the rabbit hole
In the distance, I tried to prepare myself
For the jump, but I knew I'd drop and roll
Rather than dive cleanly down the hole.
An actual dream gave me hope for the end.
Driving a winding overhang on Smith Mesa,
I saw a phenomenon comparable to the fire
Falls display that can happen at Yosemite
When the sun sets the falling thread ablaze
Without lighting the grey rock around it,
Only here I saw a waterfall that was rainbow
And as I looked, still driving along the edge
Of the gravel road on the cliff, I saw
That the rainbow waterfall was rainbow
All the way down and spilling in a river
That lit the desert canyon floor as it flowed.
And I was so excited that I noticed too late
I was about to drive over the crumbling edge
And panic grabbed me with the memory
That I have been afraid of that exact moment
For years. Somehow I didn't quite go over.
My panic functioned as a magic brake
And I teetered in the balance. Then,
The hope-giving event. Deliberately,
I leaned myself so that I tipped over
And fell free, no metal around me, just sky
And a long fall contemplating the end,
Which in my dream felt not at all like a crush
But like being grasped in a pillowy vice.
The feeling of intense pressure was pure
Suffocating delight, and I woke in the dark
Feeling better from massive endorphin rush
Than my aching body had felt in days,
And I thought, maybe I can do this, maybe.

Community Compost, Utah, 14 April 2017

It came to me of its own, without
Understanding, me its only obstruction,
Composition better without a poet, best
To have left alone as it quivered, gelatinous,
A foal on the floor, ready to lick and nurse,
But only if it could get up, immediately,
On its own four feet, kick up its cloven heels
And dance about like a marionette. Good.
A body needs a poem that can go of its own
Without the niggling revisions and perfection
Of an author determined to be understood
Or to be misunderstood or to be an author.
A girl who ferried to school with daughter
Loved horses so inordinately that she spoke
Of their natural history, their habits, and
Her own collection of miniature horse dolls
Complete with riders as if everything were
Equally real, bless her soul. Everything is not
Remotely real, and in that sense all's equal.
The idea that there is a real at all is our
Fondest species-specific delusion. Wait.
Didn't this poppet of yours specify heels
That were cloven, not whole? Well, yes,
Imagine the little mutant, goat-footed equid
Struggling to its feet and dancing like any
Foal, kicking and nuzzling the teat gleefully.
Every composition is, and is equally unreal.
Pegasus was not only strange for his wings.
There was always further weirdness under
The unnecessary legs of that flying machine.

The Indestructible Bones, Winderland Lane, Utah, 13 April 2017

Nothing I thought of hoping for will happen,
Although the smallest hopes will be
My downfall. Oh, and the whole wide world
Is holding its collective, oxygen-dependent
Breath to know what will be your downfall,
Boyo. And do you even know what boyo
Signifies? You don't. You just read some
Printed words and inferred the worst. Hope
Is the naughtiest word of them all. Bastard
Offspring of doubt and bounded rationality,
Hope dances like a nonexistent fairy
On a humble bit of leaf propped up
For a late nineteenth-century daguerreotype
Composed by a bewhiskered Englishman.
What she says by dancing, by appearing
To actually exist, is this: you can't see me
Unless you're already well beyond doomed
And living for the dreaming of your bones.

Broken, Utah, 12 April 2017

No one wanted flexible joints from masons
Building stone houses. Children, however,
Remained much fascinated with the concept
Of being double-jointed. I had seen many
Playing together, trying to bend their thumbs
In reverse. I had been one of them, except
That I was truly, horribly, painfully flexible
In my day, and could, can still, make a hand
A tarantula strolling across the surface
Of the inflexible world. Articulus, diminutive
Of artus, a joint, a vulnerability, a made thing
Carefully joined together, an Indo-European
Riddle for the making and kneecapping
Of ordinary human things. I was not one
Of the ordinary children, not even a little bit.
If my life were a mason working in stone,
The stone would've been obsidian, volcanic
Glass like the chunk from Nigeria my mother
Gave to me when I was too small not to think
Of the the scalloped, reflective, cutting
Surface of that piece of the world as magic.
Glass is not flexible, however I wished it so.

Maximum Suspension, Utah, 11 April 2017

Every once in a while in her long fall, Alice

Bypassed objects that reminded her

She was still falling. Having fallen many,

Many times with no time to be more

Than abruptly aware of the fact an instant

Before crumpling, body supposed to self

That self should be contented to finally

Have accomplished a long, long, ridiculously 

Dreamy fall over a period of nearly a decade

Between first swooning and soaring out over

The desert and the last delayed, inevitable

Blackout impact, self no more, never more.

Self castigated body for not finishing the job,

But body protested that body's only job

Was to struggle and try not to die. The fall

Was self's idea in the first place, and if

Body survived landing, no matter the pain,

Body could be considered to have done well.

Self invoked Alice. Why begin to fall at all

If the intention were not to land or wake up

Walking underground with strange beings?

But the objects that fly by us, sighed body,

Are never safe or close to hand. They hit us

And set us spinning. They never match our

Speed. They hurt. You know we have to fail,

Don't you, asked self? Body laughed sourly.

I am the one who will be transformed, who is

Forever being transformed, and if I am ash,

Dissipated under the earth, I return one way

Or another. You're the one lost for good.

Self was silent, unsuccessfully trying to keep

A secret thought from body: I will not return

Because I will be heading somewhere better,

Stranger, happier, and altogether painless,

Although I know I'll never quite make it there.

This matinee dialogue done, puppet bowed.

Morning Glory, Ashland, Oregon, 10 April 2017

That was not now. Now, who knows what?
That was a happy return to feast in the teeth
Of the monster about to feast on us. Waiting
For half an hour to get a table was worth it.
Fantastic omelets and French toast served
With mimosas in glasses the size of a skull.
We were barbarians about to be tossed
Out of the gate, feting ourselves as if
We'd won, won something, been given
Permission to pretend we could start again,
Mulligan! One wanted to write one last
Happy poem, happy puppet, dancing a jig
Of rigged, rigid limbs to illustrate that love
Of a day, of people classed as family, of
Sumptuous food, turbulent spring clouds,
Occasional rays of warm sunshine, of
Anything and everything was possible.

The Bubble Room, Ashland, Oregon, 9 April 2017

When we first reached the science museum
There was a school bus of kids unloading
And daughter decided she wanted nothing
To do with them. She suggested a picnic
In the cemetery instead. So that's what
We did, eating stale cookies on a tombstone
And feeding the ants who coursed the moss
The crumbs. A daisy, a dandelion, a spring
Raw wind under the eaves of the oaks. 

Almost done. Three deer browsed the plots
Upwind of us. Light midday traffic passed.
The ants fairly boiled over our crumbs.
I bet if you dig down there's only bones
Said daughter. We read a few dozen stones,
Looking for the oldest ones, which seemed
To date mostly from the 1870s. They were
Mostly in surprisingly good trim. A few
Had ornate pillars and carving on four sides,
Which daughter supposed might belong
To royalty. The closest to that we got
Was one Kentuckian whose pillar narrated
His arrival in the Rogue Valley alone
Mid-nineteenth century and boasted
Of how the Indians came to fear his valor.
After a while it grew chillier and daughter
Changed her mind about visiting Science
Works. We played with the interactive
Exhibits for a couple of hours, the kind
Involving echo tubes, optical illusions,
Pressure chambers, lightning spheres,

Lots of pulleys and ropes, levers, buttons,
Funhouse mirrors, air harps, frozen shadows
And general demonstrations of how
Things move, gravitate, wobble, shriek.
In the end, it was the bubble room entranced
Daughter by far the longest. Other than
A plaque on one wall drily explaining
That bubbles have a lot in common
With balloons and are what scientists call
Minimum surface objects, et cetera,
There wasn't really much science to it.
It was just an excuse to have some fun
Exploiting the same raw rules of the world
That guaranteed bones and ants and deer,
Tension and change. She swung large arcs
Of bubbles that billowed out in rainbows
And wobbled about the room, shiny eggs.
She stood in the chamber that allowed her
To haul on a ring up from her feet and raise
A bubble wall around her in a tall cylinder
That convexed and concaved, an hourglass
That collapsed inward and turned to spray.
What did it feel like? It's just gone, she said.

Ashland, Oregon, 8 April 2017

The wind blew prose romance at dawn,
Moaning around the hotel room, humming
And tossing the heads of the trees. This was
A sort of fact, a sort of set of facts. Having
Walked through the wind to breakfast, self
Settled down with body in a chair afterward
And watched the unexpected sunlight
At the end of the world. Another sort of fact.
When a puppet recites a poet's experiences
However thinly disguised as words, deshabille,
One will tend to assume there was a person
Who saw this, did that, composed the other.
There was not. Daughter over breakfast
Wanted to know what made the wind blow.
The world spins. The wind is just air caught,
Atmosphere trying to catch up. This too,
Was a sort of fact, a sort of set of facts.
The rumpled father, pulling body and self
Together may have existed once, may have
Been a myth. Now, as daughter returned
To cartoons on the couch, the compound
Entity, the sort of set of facts, stole an hour
To pretend to comfortably still exist, to see
The morning outside wandering, brilliant
And tousled, potted hedges, emerald leaves,
An idea of being, trailing thin wraps of words
Pale and flimsy as the fleeing clouds. I was.

Medford, Oregon, 7 April 2017

Sandburg's fog and Eliot's whimper were
Much on the mind as body and daughter
Descended through soft clouds to Oregon.
Daughter had flown rarely enough to be still
Moderately fascinated by the rise above
The clouds and the bumpy ride back down.
Self felt cornered in the window seat
And begged puppet to intercede with gods.
Domani spero. Puppet began to dance.
Self began to doubt the capacity to end
On anything remotely resembling own terms.
Body was exhausted, having been up
Half the night in the state of hyperextended
Panic that should have killed a kinder beast.
Nothing is any good if you can't pay for it.
The green, cleared and wooded, mangy hills
Unfolded under the lowering clouds,
And it's true that if you know the stars
And the clouds have nothing to say to you,
It makes for melancholy satisfaction when
Things are going well and being bought
In full, but will comfort you not at all when
You seek distraction from looming impact.
The plane landed on tiny cat feet, no bang.
Everyone struggled off and struggled on.

Flying Monkey Rocket Testing Grounds, Hurricane Mesa, Utah, 6 April 2017

Something other than ordinary infected
The ordinary by evening. Electricity,
Handmaiden of mad humanity, went back
And then backwards. Things plugged in
Drained and things lying about took charge.
I did not know what to say that would not
Betray me as one of those in league
With the robots I hoped would wipe us out,
Not because I'm especially fond of robots
But because I am not a fan of organic life,
Which has never managed to subsist here
On this iron-cored, magnetic, solar-wind
Deflecting planet without a gnawing hunger
Demanding the gnawing of hungry others.
Earth is a cannibal mother. Bring on the bots,
I would say, except that at the moment I
Was a blurred spotlight of attention trained
On a strangely moving thing that was not
A bug or a rodent, nor shadow in the house,
But a baffling curl of condensation masking
The fact that daughter wanted to know what
The children of Beauty and the Beast
Would have looked like. The Tin Man smiled.

Inside the Box, Butchershop, Utah, 5 April 2017

Body, self, and puppet held a small committee meeting.
Body chaired; self obsessed; puppet served as secretary.
The minutes of the meeting were written in the shorthand
Chicken-scratch that a speculative fiction writer might
Invent to pretend the poetry of aliens, elves,
Or angels. Outside the window of the soul seemed a world.
Inside, it was too dark to breathe. Translated, the motion
The committee passed appears to be an observation,
To wit: "Mainly as a result of the misconception
That the chicken had died, this piece outraged the audience."

Harrisburg / Harrisburg, Utah, 4 April 2017

It was, perhaps, another end to a beginning.
They built an interstate freeway connecting
San Diego to Sweetgrass through the Virgin
River Gorge, costliest stretch of the whole
Eisenhower Interstate Highway System,
And up through the middle of what had been
An early Mormon missionary settlement
On a precious year-round creek. Roofless
Stone pioneer houses still remained here
And there, either side of the roaring road,
Once they were done, and by the time body
Got there, searching for hideouts near water
Decades later, the upstream Harrisburg
Had become part of a conservation area
With hiking trails, campground, and one
Re-roofed but empty and boarded-up house
Surrounded by historical plaques. The other,
Downstream end of Harrisburg also had
One revenant with standing walls, no roof,
In front of a tiny, tidy trailer park named
Harrisburg Estates, of course. If it were not
So, I would have told you. Descendants
Had scattered around the surrounding
County, the patrimony of those who were
Called to Zion a century and a half before.
Years of taking my lunch upstream once
Or more each workweek had taught me
That the quietest place to sit undisturbed
Was actually nearest the historical plaques
By the white-trimmed, pink sandstone ghost
House in the brush, eschewing campground,
Picnic tables, and trailheads. I had a visitor
Once, from the other side of the highway,
An army vet who lived in the trailer park
With his dog and told derogatory tales
About the Mormon Pioneers, probably
All apocryphal. Other than that, I listened
To the birds and the trucks on the highway
And watched the seasons, read my books,
And waited for something to tell me this
Was more than the idea's corpse outleant,
These bones of homes built to be self-
Sufficient for the little while until the angel
Blew his trumpet and God told us who won.

Angel's Landing, Utah, 3 April 2017

Rudra, the storm, the howling, red, wild one,
Quiver of killer lightning, dealer of diseases,
And miraculous recoveries, nature, listen:
I would have preferred a world without you.
Being of your world, I could not imagine
Any without a nature like yours, the weapons
And parasites, the natural disasters, but
I could imagine that what was nature could
Have been unnatural, somehow, somewhere.
I knew a long time ago the whole universe,
For which, in some clever little rhetorical way
Or another, metalepsis, twikent, you stand,
Was a scam, and skeptical empiricism only
The forensics of the grift, ultimately
Unsatisfactory, as most forensic science is.
The whole of experience is double-sided
And multi-limbed and nonsensical, but no
Rebel could ever arise and fall in combat
With it, no snake or morning star who wasn't
Just another part of it, just another trick.
Still you doled out your arrows and gifts,
Your slaughter, shame, and holy beverages,
And those who never praised or prayed
To you, praised and prayed for mercy to you
By another name, equally severe and sweet.
I addressed you from this precipice because
I knew I had rebelled by refusing to abide
By the inevitable and must inevitably go
Along with all those also begging for mercy
And those who played at serving you humbly
As your priests and charioteers. The costs
Of service and defiance alike are erasure
And loss, even of you, of all of you, nature,
But there's a special spite reserved
For those who disavow the beauty of you,
The necessity of the rules. I wanted you
To know I am one of those and I never, never,
Although I too am a part of you, wanted you.

Pioneer Cemetery, Utah, 2 April 2017

I had no grave, nor would I ever, I suspected,
Since I never existed, but I liked to visit
My grave once a week in the rain. Small,
Like a child's grave or one reserved
For ashes in an urn, a piece of gold leaf
Where the tongue had been, Orphic
Advice to the ashes about what to do after,
That sort of a spot, good also for a dead cat,
It nonetheless moved me, the lush grasses
And the millennium-old yew trees stooped,
Still growing around the plaque I could cover
With one hand. Here lies I, speaker of verse,
Believer in the immortality of patterns
Of words. It was surprisingly verbose
For such a tiny commemoration, how fitting.

Broken Hourglass, Utah, 1 April 2017

There wasn't time to describe what time
Was doing to the description. The slow
Was what confused us all. We thought it
Stopped. We gave it names. We thought
Names stopped. We thought we stopped
At stable places, time to time, and rested.
Slow time filled our sleepy heads
With dreams sometimes of never, no time.
A page from an anthology of emblems,
From the heyday of the emblem craze
Four centuries or so ago, showed three
Clues, one a woodcut, one a Latin adage,
One a witty couplet in Italian. Imagine
A child who read neither Latin nor Italian
Coming upon a reprint of that page
On someone's coffee table. What to make
Of the angelic hourglass filled, not
With grains of sand but bonbons vaguely
Shaped like skulls? The child would think
The goal would be to break the angel
Hourglass surmounted by face and wings,
Get at the candy and find out how it tasted.