Coyote, New Mexico, 30 September 2017

I hadn't seen the last of them, those
Extraordinary roadside memorials, tragically
Numerous and extravagantly maintained,
All individualized, most colorful, many
Half buried in pots of fresh flowers.
The contents of an entire village cemetery
Were scattered across the roads of northern
New Mexico, I thought as I left Taos for Page
And on back to Zion. In Montana, discreet
Signs let the traveler know a white cross
Represented a traffic death at that location,
And throughout the state identical, standard,
Modest white crosses on steel supports
Marked the points of death. If two deaths,
Then two identical crosses, twins, sprouted
From a single metal post. Otherwise, nothing
Else identified the events commemorated.
But here, just two states away, everything
To do with roadside grieving had become
Wondrously effortful and personal.
In Coyote, less than two miles apart, two
Memorials on the same side of the road
Testified. The easternmost featured fully
Seven pots of living flowers, pink, white,
And yellow, well-watered, set on white
Gravel and bordered like a small garden
With a low wall of stones, under an unusual
Black cross, the upright barely taller
Than the cross bar was wide, purple letters
Festooning the structure with the name
And dates of the deceased. Papers pinned
To the top of the cross looked like letters
Or crumpled, multiple versions of INRI.
To the west, the next memorial went further.
The stone wall had been cemented and was
The exact size and shape of a man's coffin.
Flowers were planted to grow in it, pink,
Yellow, purple, and white, with a heart-shape
Bouquet of red roses festooning the head
Of the cross, while, this time, white stones
Ranged round outside of the coffin planter,
With a second, plain white cross at the foot.
What were the relatives of the deceased
Intending to convey by building that planter
Shaped like a coffin, all of good flagstone,
And filling it with repeated pots of flowers?
Humans were burying defleshed ancestors
Under the floorboards and in house walls
For at least as long as there were sedentary
Precedents, but what could be the point
Of a secondary memorial at the very spot
Of death, one not including body or ashes?
These garlanded cenotaphs, these warnings
To everyone else on the road that death
Was just a bit further down that same road,
Again and again, they were performing
Mysteries. Here lies nothing of the persons
Who died, except a proof that they were not
Forgotten. I worshipped, respectively, cap
In hand, each madness, and then I drove on,
Counting more crosses, considering mine.

D.H. Lawrence Memorial, New Mexico, 29 September 2017

Probably, Frieda mixed his ashes in cement
She used for the phoenix altar in the chapel.
A couple of decades later, she was buried
Full-length before the white chapel's door.
The whole concatenation of revenants stood
Now at the top of a zig-zagging sidewalk
Through the cedars above the ranch house,
Twenty-five hundred meters, give or take,
Above sea level, looking west over slopes
That fell swiftly to scrublands and the gorge
Of El Rio Grande del Norte. How in the hell
Could the thin air have been thought to help
His consumption? I stared at the phoenix,
His totem, wishing the ashes to reassemble
And the man to step out of the crumbling
Cement, looking uncertain and bemused.
We're good at disintegration and brilliant
At faded monuments, but we're impossible
When it comes to resurrection, we are.

Enchanted Circle, New Mexico, 28 September 2017

After a few days, the superabundance 

Of gawdy roadside crosses and dour

Hitchikers in heavy, dull clothing began 

To wear me down, as if I weren't a stub

Of battered body already, badly stumbling.

After a tour of the touted Enchanted Circle

Scenic loop north of Taos, buttery aspens,

Dark spruce, a few small ski towns, lakes,

Three-thousand meter mountain passes,

Rain clouds raising and lowering scrims,

I retreated to my rented room in a converted

Hacienda, pulled the blinds, lit the candles.

One cross had been coated in orange chiles

And another had floral hoops and archways.

The actual cemeteries were concentrations

Of the same, lacking the great white Jesus

Statues of rural cemeteries in Quebec, but

Making up for it in extravagant colors, as if

A thousand bower birds had lost their minds.

Grief. We only haunt ourselves, and the end

Of our haunting is when we leave the colors

And the monuments, and the weary, hanging

Heads of hitchhikers, the names, the signs,

The stories behind. In the last gallery 

Of the Millicent Rogers museum, a copy

Of a letter she wrote to her youngest son

Days before she died hung on the wall.

"And I thought if I stretched out my hands

They would be Earth and green would grow

From me. And I knew that there was no 

Reason to be lonely that one was everything,

And Death was as easy as the rising sun

And as calm and natural. . . so that Being

Part of the Earth one was never alone."

Hlauuma, New Mexico, 27 September 2017

This did not happen: I did not photograph,
Much less climb into the sacred kivas,
Still in daily use, that I could see behind
The sawhorse with the No Trespassing sign.
I did not wade into the Red Willow Creek.
I did not meet a stranger who engaged me
In long and earnest conversation, although
Perhaps I said a few polite hellos and thanks,
Maybe I complimented a mother on her baby
And discussed the differing scents of sage
And various kinds of cedar with an elder.
I did not find myself out of the clutches
Of the likely, of the things that happened.
I may have moved around a bit and taken
A few pictures and eaten a piece of frybread,
But I did not escape into another dimension
Although I did know exactly why: I existed.
My existence was the bar to my release.
I watched the clouds gather over the peaks,
But I did not have a vision of any other
World, smudged with sage, sacred, me in it.

Carson National Forest, New Mexico, 26 September 2017

Body kept count of the roadside crosses
For a while, lonely on the long road, lonely
And prone to thinking about the last moment
Of anyone's life, the thought, perhaps, this
Is my last thought, no wait, this is, no.
No matter how many thousands of times,
Tens of thousands by now, body had drifted
Back to sleep, obliterating self and mind,
No matter how obvious it was in retrospect
Each time that awareness couldn't be there
For anyone to remember later what it was
Like to stop existing, even temporarily, no,
Body could not stop pushing thoughts close
To that event horizon from which no return.
At one point, high in a forest on approach
To Taos, the car drifted by a white cross
With a spray of small American flags
And several plastic roses, a name and dates
Inked in gothic lettering large enough to read
From the road's other side: Dale Cooley
5/10/63-5/22/09. Where were you, if you
Were, on either of those dates? On the latter,
Dale died in a traffic accident in the woods
At the age of just barely forty-six. I thought
About Dale the rest of the road to Taos,
How he died, how'd he die? I almost forgot
To mention that there was a much smaller,
Brown cross, without lettering or decoration
Right beside Dale's. The other victim? Child?
An earlier or later accident at the same spot,
As near to nowhere as paved roads get?
Maybe even another cross for Dale, placed
By someone wanting to mourn separately,
Without raising a fuss, a lover, an ex-wife.
Humans make such mysteries from the most
Common occurrences, all our sleeping,
Napping, crashing, vanishing, dying, dying.

Cape Final, Arizona, 25 September 2017

A kind of bodily resurrection when it felt
Like I'd been in the exact same spot before.
And that other spot, and that other spot.
The bottom railing at Point Imperial at noon,
Surely the same place as Point Imperial
In the predawn chill fifteen years ago
With a new and newly pregnant wife, waiting
For the sunrise over the quiet canyon.
The Point Royal walk out over the perfect
Triangle hole in the ledge, tourists like ants
Collecting images instead of crumbs, surely
The same exact viewpoint as a decade ago,
The marriage now ended, the baby never born.
The rectangular foundations of ancient
Houses left by the ancestors who farmed
Imported beans, maize, and squash there
In the summers, for five generations or so,
Roughly nine hundred years ago, until
Perhaps the world got too dry, with even
The same informational plaques, surely
The same ruins where I stood two years gone,
Wife turned to ash seven years earlier, but
A daughter now to think of, however far
Away from me that day. And so on, Cape Final
To Bright Angel. To return to a known
Place that felt unchanged was to reincarnate,
The body realigned with bodies long gone,
Own especially. A crisp breeze rustled
The hair thinner and more silver than ever,
And the heavy animal hobbled slowly back
To the car. None of this was here. None
Of this was ever here. Every body is always
Older. Every older body, by being so, is new.

Owl Creek Bridge, Utah, 24 September 2017

Some part of Farquhar actually knew,
But that didn't stop the delusion. He swam
And he thought to himself, I couldn't
Help myself, I had to keep thinking through
The drop. As long as I was falling, I believed
In the possibility of escape more than in
The possibility of nothing having ever been
Because as long as I was falling, I was,
And things had quite obviously been. Now,
I just need to survive until I get to shore.
Then I'm sure I can find my way home. Then
Things will just carry on, and why not?
Haven't they always carried on? Haven't I
Always been around, for as long as I can
Remember? Being is the way life is,
And things die or disappear, but every time
I check, I'm still here. There's no darkness
And silence at the end. I'm still here.
Those are the things he thought as he swam
Or fell, or whatever it was he was being
When he wasn't being dead just yet. No one
Is dead, he thought as he reached the trees,
No one is ever dead, only death's witness
From the outside. So why my urgency?

Haunted Canyon, Utah, 23 September 2017

Merely in living as and when we lived, we

Heard propositions on the air, such as

The young LDS father in the parking lot

Telling his daughter riding on his shoulders,

You can be a pioneer yourself, for Jesus.

Not, technically, metaphysics, but so much

Metaphysical implication behind the analogy.

Body, as a small boy among evangelicals,

Heard similar exhortations sharing borders

With allegory and typology: Onward,

Christian soldiers, marching as to war!

The spirits we released into the air

From our throats, waving our hands,

Exhorting and gesticulating, what if

They came to life after we were gone, were

Not dependent on us as they seemed,

But left behind by our extinction to discuss

Their fates and origins among themselves?

Under the cottonwoods, extinction eyeing

Me like a raven in the shade, taking

My measure, not picking me apart just yet,

Body imagined the variously described

Versions of Jesus, along with other gods,

Sitting cross legged and wondering what

To do now their authors and believers were

All gone. And then, if that could happen,

The many other supernatural beings

Posited by humans as existing with wants

And personalities, the ones whose authors

And believers died out centuries, millennia

Ago, they could have been circulating

Quietly like lost sheep, feral cats or horses,

All those years while other saints and deities

Were invented, added to the atmosphere.

The sky swarms with human imaginings

No longer home in any human brains.

I could be a pioneer myself, for these lost.

Mountain Stream, Utah, 22 September 2017

Akbar who could not either read or write,
Inspiration of many richly detailed writings,
Capable of burning a besieged city
To the ground with all its children inside,
Practiced religious pluralism, invited all
Dust-stained denizens of the fields
Of reflection, wearers of patched garments,
Sitters in the dust, insouciant recluses,
And rabidly self-congratulatory proselytizers
To attend and join the debates in his palace,
Proclaimed, all religions are equally true
Or all religions are equally illusory. Real piece
Of work, that Akbar. Never stopped going
To mosque but popped up as a worshipper
At Hindu temples, Jesuit churches, Parsi
Fire services. Supported Sikhs, proposed
To Jesuits and Imams that they take turns
Walking through fire, to see who was right,
Even took a crack at founding his own,
Divine Faith, with himself at the center,
And although it did not take, it did provide
The world with one of the most slyly
Sacrilegious puns: Allahu Akbar, which could
As well claim God is great and God is Akbar.
Some four centuries later, in another land,
I sat by a relatively uncultured river, clean
Waters at altitude blown back against gravity
Prettily but unsuccessfully, of course,
By the incoming autumn wind bestrewing
Quaking aspen leaves as magic, floating
Gold coins on the ruffled green waves. There
I read about Akbar, and I thought how well
He could have played a part in any allegory
In which his giveaway name was Culture.
His father had blinded his uncle. His son
Beheaded his beloved biographer. You see?
When winds paused, even the surface sank.

Snow Canyon, Utah, 21 September 2017

There was nothing to this landscape
But corrugated beauty, the heaps of black
Basalt sprawled under the sheer, fractured
Ochre, white, and buff sandstone cliffs.
Therefore, although hunters had passed
Freely for millennia and Latter Day settlers
Had run cattle through the scrub, no one
Sedentary had ever made farms or factories.
In an overcrowded world it began to serve
A purpose for tourists and local visitors.
Even on a weekday during the school year,
In the canyons where no one actually lived,
Lines of brightly clothed cyclists and duller
Trail walkers in shorts and dun sun hats
Snaked out from trailheads clustered
With parked RVs, pick-up trucks, and cars.
I wanted to know, as escapist and common
As the rest of them, seated at a picnic table
In one old juniper's speckled egg of shade,
Why beauty was for visiting, why beauty
Was beauty at all, why I would rather drive
Here than remain in a bustling town, why
Even here, I would rather drive all the rest
Of my mostly affable, chatty conspecifics
Out of sight and earshot to keep this for me.
I could not see the use of any of it to me,
But when a woman walked back to her family
Disappointed she had not spotted the rare
Desert tortoise on her hike, I tilted my ears
A moment to listen, just in case there was
Information in her words. What do we want,
What magic, always just past the edge
Of what's easiest for us and never enough?

Hop Valley, Utah, 20 September 2017

I had long thought the soul a construction
Of human cultural activity, a tool in the kit,
Like a compass, like God, like language,
But it did puzzle me how the mechanism
Most sprang to life when humans receded.
Two hours without seeing another soul
Was enough for my own internal marionette
To leap to life in the way of all marionettes,
Waked with a jerk of the strings, clattering
Upright in a manner that more suggested
Spontaneous self-assembly than an animal
Stirring. How spiritual I could feel if others
Weren't around to raise and lower my spirits.
Gold rabbitbrush and ochre-tipped green
Gambel oaks, sand-colored dry grasses,
Mother-of-pearl clouds on robin's egg skies,
Unseeable breezes that could be heard
Wandering here and there, half a mile off,
Scents of high-desert autumn on approach,
All of these merely sensory irrelevancies felt
Playful, soulful, at least until a few persons
Joined the scene with their nodding heads,
Voices, observations, and prior relationships.
I began to suspect I had confused distinct
Notions hovering around one fragrant word.
There was the soul of society, indeed
An artifice, a collectively made thing. And
Maybe there could be a soul beyond all this,
That could come only when all this was left.
But the seeming soul of a wordy mammal
Alone with a wordless world was the no soul
To which one could make reference but
Could not place, not be, not keep, not share,
A quick, awkward grace, Cather's happiness,
Dumb enlightenment, any animal's sudden
Contentment, jig danced and lost on the air.

Hurricane, Utah, 19 September 2017

Daughter and a friend, aged six and eight,

Were discussing something fun, a trick

One of them had learned how to do, while

In the back of the car on the way to school,

When somehow they turned metaphysical.

Daughter, who can barely read at all as yet

And who had just minutes earlier offered 

Her pedagogical proposal that school should

Be held every other day and not every day

(Like her father, pathologically predisposed

To loathe anything extending too relentlessly 

Into the foreseeable future [as a gifted child

Her age who adored books, lived for reading,

I was nonetheless horrified and stricken

By the realization one morning in first grade

That I would have to attend school regularly

For at least another dozen years, twice 

As long as my entire life to that point, 

An unfathomable sentence of dull repetition]

And also, like her father, creatively inclined

To neatly, pragmatically doomed solutions),

Now observed "Nothing lasts forever, get it?"

She laughed. Her friend retorted, "So what?"

Daughter tried to explain her joke. "No,

Everyone knows it like that. I mean, 'nothing

Does last forever.' Nothing is something

That lasts forever!" Her driving father felt as 

If she'd just lifted his wallet or had proven

The genetic determination of paronomastics..

"Now do you get it?" Her friend countered,

"Scientists say even something you think

Is nothing always really has something in it."

"I know," shrugged daughter, unimpressed.

"My hands look empty but they have air."

"Not just air." "Well, and chemicals." "Germs!

Every time you wave your hand you're

Pushing millions of germs around you can't

See." "Poor germs. Sorry I hit you. Too bad."

"So everything has something in it." "Yes...."

Triumphantly now, "So that's why nothing is 

Nothing!" Wild peal of child laughter. QED.

Canyon Mouth, Zion, 18 September 2017

My great-grandparents, none of whom
I ever knew myself, nonetheless had been
Sasha for decades, living in the memories
Of my parents, aunts, uncles, older cousins.
But the parents, aunts, and uncles, save two
Remaining, had become sasha themselves,
As well as most of the oldest cousins. Soon
My great-grandparents would be zamani,
The truly dead, held in no living memory
However distorted by time, records only,
A few stories passed down by their sasha
Descendants to the currently living,
Secondary and tertiary reports of memories.
This second death comes to everyone,
Even playwrights and emperors. Memory
Must move on like any other phenomenon.
Why was I thinking of such things, sitting
Across from daughter at the canyon mouth?
Someone called me grandpa, common
Mistake, and it occurred to me that our gap
Was such as to make it unlikely I'd ever be
Anyone's grandfather but also then that this
Little being was most likely to keep me
In sasha for decades, the last to release me.
And I looked at her differently, the last
To actually remember me. But I don't believe
In such notions, actually. One death for me.

Courtyard Solitude, Utah, 17 September 2017

No human ever lived alone, not without
The language of others in mind, but I was
As alone as I had been in a long time, more
So than when on the road in a foreign land
Where I didn't speak the language. I was
Home, after a manner of speaking,
On familiar ground, but without family,
Daughter having gone to a sleepover
At a neighbor's and the rest having run out
After the rabbits. Only the lame stood,
Swaying on my crutches in the courtyard,
Alone with the language of others, musty
Bones. I deceived to eat. I woke up realizing
I was more coyote than backyard lap dog,
But there I was stuck in my own backyard.
Coyote could have, I supposed, considered it
Fortunate that none of it would be mine
Much longer. For myself, I remained afraid
Of the garden gate, of going through it,
Of going through with it.  If you look back
To find out what happened after you left,
You realize only that you haven't yet left.
How alone would I have had to be not to be?

Pipe Springs, Arizona, 16 September 2017

I rolled by without a pause. I had been
Here before or close enough to pretend
It was a stable place, the same space
In passing. I remembered as best I could
What I had done with that time I had paused.
Taken a short hike. Spoken with a ranger.
Driven back out to the main road
And pumped gas. Driven on. Driven home,
As I then conceived it. What is a monument
If not a recreation of the lost? This time,
Under brilliant blue skies and with nothing
But time to kill before I died, I rolled by.

Hideout, Utah, 15 September 2017

I doubt the robbers thought their roost
Would hide them well forever, for life.
But there must have been that magic interval
Before the posse's hooves could be heard
Clopping down the canyon shadows, days
And nights when the calm was as natural
As a satisfied beast after a meal and a sleep.
I understood that interval myself. It's not
Something that can be conjured or kept,
But when it descends, the Hunter rising
In the onset autumn sky, leftover lightning
Signing the silhouettes of far mesas, moon
Poking about at the end of its invisible leash
Lengthening ever so slowly over these eons,
It feels like the embrace you always wanted
And never could keep then, either, and that
Is the whole of it. Every so often what goes
On is tender enough, placid enough, safe
Enough for you to wish it were not going,
Although you know that's how it came.

Suspense, Utah, 14 September 2017

Not for anyone else, of course, and weirdly
Sometimes barely at all for me, the bridge
To the experienced universe that never was,
Never will be swayed gently in a soft storm
Wind generated by a single flickering cloud
In an otherwise blue local sky. What to do
When it's too late and the damage is, if not
Actually done, well in the midst of doing?
I stepped out onto the rectangle of lawn
Edged by Afghan pines, ash, and mulberry,
The stars appearing to be a calm backdrop
North, west, and south, the single cloud
Attempting a small Apocalypse over the cliff
To the east. The air was like the touch
Of a a gifted therapist's hands, pausing
While pressing, as if comfort could be
Imparted the same moment pain contained.
No rain, and no thunder. No wildfires
Candling junipers or ponderosas up high,
Just cloud to cloud lightning and the gift
Of the passage that said, "This was it,
All the balmy turmoil necessary in the land
Of the never lived, happily soon to be dead."

Sinawava, Zion, 13 September 2017

Playing hooky, hiding in a crowd of tourists
Climbing out of and into park shuttle buses,
I thought of Rip Van Winkle forever escaping
Town to loll about in the hills. Yesterday
Was closer, the gods bowling thunder, birds
Singing in the aspens by the reservoir. Today
Was merely hiding in plain sight, in shade.
All these people come for hiking, for sights,
A dozen languages at least, young and old,
The buff, the plump, and the grotesques,
Though few as blatantly so as me. Walking
Sticks and sandals. Shorts and sun hats.
What was I to make of this danse macabre?
Nothing much more lively seeming
Than thickly meandering clots of people
Chattering and murmuring in summer colors,
The inexhaustible supply of us all.
Another double shuttle pulls up, disgorges,
And the one in front of it, full, creaks away.
How many wars, how many plagues
Would it take to replace this aching
Loneliness with something like true solitude?
Why the more we are, the lonelier?

Far End of the Reservoir, Kolob, Utah, 12 September 2017

A nap in the open car, doors wide, beside
The green waters. The aspens, just come
Into leaf four months ago already hinted
Yellow. A few migratory waterfowl, one
Of which looked to be, startlingly, an actual
Black swan, drew their arrowing wakes.
It couldn't have been a black swan. Wrong
Intersection of changes for such a thing.
When the thunder dropped out of a cloud
That hadn't looked particularly ominous,
An unseen bird started up a squeaky chirping.
Down in the desert, the day was hot
And ordinary, and although the stone cliffs
Were world-class beautiful and drawing
Crowds even on an ordinary Monday, all
That milling about felt bland, so many people
Being the default mode of the current world.
At the far end of the small reservoir, where
The gates of the hideaway summer estates
Were already padlocked for the year, a dead
End at one gate made for an empty retreat,
No human passing, no cattle lowing, no one
To turn aside for or nod at or wish good day.
The small hours of a summer in mountains,
The small hours of a life, the peace of slower
Change, when time expanded sluggishly
Like a river gone glassy at the lip of the falls.
There was nothing to make of this, this
Dry thunder and bright, pulsing bird call, this
Green silk scarf drawn through the eye.

Zion, Utah, 11 September 2017

The question was what to do with oneself
During the last days, the few days,
The crushing speed of the approach
Through empty hours. There were errands.
There were ordinary challenges to living,
There were risks to avoid but why avoid
Them when the drop waited behind them?
Standing in the courtyard the sunset before,
Watching the tiny bats wheel through indigo
As daughter talked to herself about art
And nature, interpreting things she'd heard
For herself, making mixed media abstracts
Of construction paper, sharpie, water, dirt,
One could be forgiven for feeling suspended
In the last amber drop of the day. I say,
One could be forgiven but one won't be.

Springdale, Utah, 10 September 2017

There was a dream I had, kept having,
That I was alive, that I had left and returned.
The leaving always felt freeing, a jail break,
And the return was always slightly stunning.
How had it happened that here I was again
Where I thought I had taken my last leave?
Every morning this would happen,
Every week and every season, every year.
I never knew exactly how it was I returned.
I thought I never would, but I did and I did.
But I didn't. I always escaped. I never
Returned. It was only that each escape
Traced a parabola toward the same point,
Infinitely vanishing and near as god damn
To the previous exit but never the same.
And I said to myself as the soft shoulder air
Of early September settled in the courtyard
Of the half foreclosed house of sanctuary
In Zion, as the retreating harvest moon rose,
To escape you have to stop escaping.

Salt Lake City, Utah, 9 September 2017

Unrolling the spool towards its end, the mind
Kept getting snagged on a more recent
Memory that ate at the value of the past.
Daughter on basalt at Craters of the Moon,
Teal t-shirt and blue jeans, the sky blue-grey
With wildfire ash, gold rabbitbrush blooms
Carpeting the black rocks, high as her arms,
So that her round blonde head bobbed
A balloon above almost-matching flowers.
Below her the panorama of broken lava
Sprawled to horizon, peculiarly grim beauty.
I had hobbled out on the trail behind her
And forgot to bring my phone. No photos.
Well oh well. Photos distort everything.
Thirty years earlier, I had bummed around
Europe for a summer on a Eurail Pass,
A youth hostel card, and five hundred
Dollars in travelers' cheques. No watch,
No phone of any kind of course, no camera.
I brought back only one snapshot someone
Had taken of me in sunflowers in Germany,
But I dined out on the anecdotes for years,
And several small visuals from the sojourn,
Of a goat on an overnight train in Spain,
Of the fine red-gold hairs on a girl's arm
On a railing in the sun, of the moment
I turned a corner and came face to face
With Goya's Saturn at the Prado, survived,
Memories hallucinatorily rich and unpinned
By the scraps of pictures that tie us down.
So I thought to console myself about my lack
Of snaps of daughter in the black and bloom
Of that recent afternoon, contented myself
With describing the day to her grandparents
Down in Salt Lake. But I went to bed worse
For the telling, for the realization none of us
Had thirty years left to savor the description.
A photograph might have been treasured
By daughter, by generations after, the way
I had pored over the few daguerreotypes
Of my mid-nineteenth century ancestors.
But what good was my memory now?
It amounted to storing papers in a fire.

Big Lost River, Idaho, 8 September 2017

Daughter decided it was her
Turn to contribute more
Directly, she said, to wit:

Dark dancing shadows
Dance with the night.
The full moon's lost
And they're dancing bright.

Dark dancing shadows
Dance in the night.
Big to small,
They're all dancing bright.

When the sun's out
They turn light.

Missoula, Montana, 7 September 2017

It felt so impossible to be there again, it

Almost felt possible to return again later.
Be here now; be there later. Is that so hard?
Yes, yes it is, especially if I were to specify
Where there would be. Daughter asked how
And why they made the giant white M
On Mt. Sentinel, looming over campus.
A general explanation of form and function
Was easy enough, but no, really, how, and
No, really, why? No one has ever known.
The river ran on outside the sliding screen.
The evening air held the suggestion of myth
Or dream, of apocalypse, prematurely grey,
And not even from local fires. The world
From Portland west, from White Horse
South, down and out to Los Angeles,
The Great Plains, was one pall of ash
From the sprawl of thousands of fires.
So, we weren't actually there again, after all,
We had come to this new, dying place,
The sentinel a ghost on its own mountain
And neither it nor we would ever be so again.
It was almost bedtime and we were tired
But we decided to play a game.

Farewell Slocanada, 6 September 2017

There were names I had visited I never
Once revisited again. I don't think I bothered
To tell myself in 1983, this may be the last
Time I ever see Ninole. In 1987, I was fine
Turning my back on Shakespeare & Co.
And short-term employer, George Whitman.
I didn't fly out of Moscow wondering, in '96,
If I would ever see the Novodevichy Monastir
Again. But again, I tottered at the end
Of another summer at the lake, a tenth,
Wondering if I would ever come close to this
Experience in some future version of life.
Only this year, I thought not. A spar
From some unknown carpentry project
Somehow carried into the lake, who knew
When, bumped up against the portable dock
And then floated out again. Floated in,
And then drifted out again. The shoreline
Up high at the spring water mark bristled
With driftwood lodged there and left. I left.

Rosebery Regatta, Slocanada, 5 September 2017

Yesterday was the traditional end of summer
And in a thirty-six year old local tradition
For the Labor Day Holiday, a toy boat regatta
Was held down at Rosebery Bay. Five or six
Homemade boats competed, a turnout
Made smaller by the aging of the community
And the fine weather tempting families
To do more independent things. A handful
Of small children, a handful of their parents,
And a cluster of maybe a dozen veterans
Of the early years in the eighties, when this
Was more of a soused party than a picnic,
When they had been younger than a number
Of the young parents gathered today, racing
Their own creations and not on behalf
Of their kids, either. Near where the wreck
Of a century-old barge moldered in shallows
The little group sprawled and made jolly.
Everything was ending, not only this summer,
You would think to hear the grown-ups talk.
The few kids didn't care, didn't really care
About the boats or the race. None was older
Than seven. Only one had contributed
Significantly to his family's entry, a driftwood
Tri-hulled catamaran with a square sail.
(The shape of the sail had been the boy's
Idea, and it won him two out of three races.)
After a couple of leisurely hours, a winner
Of the Commodore's Cup was declared,
There was a bit of clapping, another boy,
An awkward seven-year old, was draped
In the captain's hat and coat with epaulets.
Later, daughter and I went down to the lake
Closer to the cabin for a late-afternoon swim
Only to find the summer neighbors' boats
Already gone from their moorings, the vast
Shimmering of the lake in the warm, late sun
Clean, empty. I will never again, I thought then,
See any of those people, this lake, that event
With its honorary bottle of rum inscribed
Like the Stanley Cup with every past
Winner's name--or, more precisely, they likely
Will never again see me. Other friends
Around the lake were pulling up stakes,
Even longtime year-round residents, but
We made a game of toasting to next spring,
And who knows, maybe the Regatta will run
Years more, again and again. That was yesterday
Now, and so what did today bring? Another
Postscript in the unending chain of the same.

Wendy's Château, Slocanada, 4 September 2017

John Ashbery had just died at a ripe old age,
And I imagined who might now be saying
Somewhere, as Yeats had done, "now I'm
The king of the cats." Not me, certainly,
One of the mice perhaps, not even a duke
Of the rats. Like the eleven-year old dog
Gasping on a pallet at the neighbor's, like
The huge and wonderful cat used to patrol
Wendy's back garden by the glorified shed
With a bed she still calls the Château, I was
Short of breath and in no inconsiderable
Discomfort. The trap that catches a mouse
Is the mouse. Or the dog, the poet, the cat.
I sat outside and listened to Wendy's creek
While daughter played, shrieked, harvested,
And eventually settled down in another shed
Nicknamed the Caravan to watch a kid's flick
With three other kids, all piled on a futon
And watching scenes projected on the wall.
I should have been swimming. I should have
Been already, like so many, long dead. I
Kept breathing, heavily, anyway, thinking
Of sitting around Bruce Bigley's dining table
In Missoula thirty years ago, five or six of us
Reading "Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror"
For our seminar on the longer lyric.
What was it had entranced me at the time?
Perhaps nothing so much as the ambition
Of the thing, the scale of a cat king trapped
In being a cat as seen by me trapped
In being something more like a mouse.
An actual heather vole, "imposter mouse,"
Flicked across a corner of my field of vision.
One of us will outlast the other this winter,
But I couldn't give you good odds on which one.

Nearly Full Moon, Slocanada, 3 September 2017

When had I last felt so casually betrayed?
When had I last felt justified to rage? No one
Is justified to rage against another human,
Not even the most exquisitely evil ones; no
One is truly justified in raging against other
Beasts, funguses, or trees. Justification,
However, is not the half of righteousness.
The orthodox as easily, as justifiably
As the heathen rage, and all the orthodoxies
Rage against each other. But I was playing
Kayfabe with such theological distractions.
The truth was much more personal and hurt.
I had been deserted by one eager-to-desert.
I had watched the nearly full moon shine
In the corrugated shimmer of lake, wanting
To swim naked within that chalky glimmering
Against its dusty blackboard background.
I wanted to be able to claim I was a person
And that I alone could choose which persons
I would ever surface to talk to again. I did.

Bird's Nest, Slocanada, 2 September 2017

For an hour, after an hour spent catching

Small fry in a butterfly net, daughter contented 

Herself with trying to build a usable bird's nest

Out of moss, twigs, straw, and leaves. When

She surrendered in exasperation, she asked

To watch a clip of a weaver bird doing his best

At making a perfect grass sphere complete

With a circular door that his beloved selected.

Then she caught a salamander. Then the wily

Salamander nipped her, hard enough to escape.

Then we went up to the cabin and watched

The 1939 Wizard of Oz, having read through

The first five L. Frank Baum books at bedtime

And neither one of us having seen more

Than clips, heard more than songs from

The famous movie version.  The cleverness

And distortion of the thing caught me, raised

On Eraserhead, as much as the dancing

And displacement caught her. Oz in his nest,

Trying to manipulate the strings of a world

He didn't conceive, trapped in Art Deco

Spires of grass green he couldn't, until another

Alien came, leave, haunted me. I am the great

And captured wizard, nest incomplete, who

Still weaves, who saved his serendipitous means

Of escape balloon. Don't pay any attention to me.

Adela, Slocanada, 1 September 2017

The whole beets, carrots, string beans,
And small potatoes that made up most
Of dinner had been pulled from the garden
That afternoon. The small girls, daughter
And pal, raced up and down the staircase,
Snatched bites, lowered their voices
When told. The creek rustled around
The garden, one continuous chorus.
The couple quietly falling apart, one leaving
For love, the other for dying, kept it quiet
And spoke with the eyes for each other
That only a decade of cohabitation piled
Upon a foundation of reckless abandon
Could understand. The intimacy of the long
Relationship, broken, is as intense as any
Limerent lovers' entangled glances. No one
Else understands them. Blueberry crumble
Served in bowls for desert, four helpings
For the girls huddled over coloring projects,
One and a half for the severed intimates
Who didn't notice their pacifist host slap a fly.