Fireworks, Salt Lake City, New Year’s Eve 2017

They set them off early, first a few individuals
Scattered around residential neighborhoods,
And then a proper display just before ten.
Or they set them off late, as by early afternoon
Online, one could read the reports and see
The clips and pics of completed celebrations
In Polynesia, Hong Kong, Auckland, Sydney.
Who knew what time it really was anywhere?
We didn’t do fireworks for New Year’s Eve
In the neighborhood where I grew up,
And my evangelical family preferred
Watch Night services at our cinderblock church
To New Year’s Rocking Eve on TV. The first
Time I recall firecrackers going off at midnight
Was at the end of 1987, when I was in Hoboken
With a sometime lover and some friends.
It was snowing and people on the street
Were popping off small fireworks randomly.
I drove away down a dark white interstate
And was, as they say, lucky to get home alive.
In 1999 in Chicago, my girlfriend and I spent
The afternoon in bed watching the millennium
Crawl across the globe and when our turn
Came, we stood at the window of our hotel room
Wrapped in a blanket to watch the anticlimax
Of a second-rate display over Lake Michigan.
(Chicago had parceled its fireworks displays
And distributed them around town, fearing
Too large a gathering and the Millenium Bug.)
Las Vegas, New Orleans, Chicago again,
But I didn’t see fireworks for the holiday again
Until I moved to Salt Lake City, in the aughts,
When I would sometimes watch them
From my downtown condo balcony
While my New-Year’s-Eve despising wife slept.
In ‘08, with a new fiancée in Takaka, New Zealand
I watched a pitiful few squibs over a warm bay.
After that, it wasn’t until a couple of years ago
That a new year came in again with a display.
I took my daughter to our small town celebration
Outside Zion, which was set off early enough
For a five year-old. And last year, as a family,
We watched the same charming local show
From our backyard. It was good enough, although
I knew when it started that this year would be
Impossible for us. And then here I was,
An honest revenant at the end, not much,
But still breathing some weeks after freezing,
Back in Salt Lake as a guest, while daughter slept
Next to a glow-in-the-dark flower we’d sculpted
And the complete Harry Potter volumes.
Our hosts-in-law had gone upstairs to bed.
The fireworks were heard from our perspective
As distant, sprinkled gunfire, invisible from here,
And I watched the Times Square ball drop
That I’d only seen in person once, in 1989,
The night my grandfather died in his bed,
And who knew what time really was anywhere?

Thumbs Up, 1500 South, Salt Lake City, 30 December 2017

Nothing like a small house party to prove
That human sociality is dangerous, to humans
In particular. Or perhaps the man who lied
By implication, suggesting he was cheerful
And social and capably human himself, maybe
More capable, even, than most, was just
His own threat to his own well-being,
And the rest of the folks were simply being
Folks being nice. Well, wait, all but one. One
Was like him but more obviously, pacing
The room relentlessly, tugging the ends
Of her hair and smiling only to herself.
He watched, or more accurately, he witnessed
Her and her patterns, and he knew that she
Was the only honest soul in attendance,
The one whose frantic, ritualized routines
Came only to show how cold the rest were,
How cold the cheerful human world, and dumb.
She nodded when he saluted her, in the midst
Of other nonsense, with one raised thumb.

Sugar House Liquor Store, Utah, 29 December 2017

The young stock clerk with the fanciful beard
And waxed moustaches carried open boxes
Of California vintages. His left bicep sported
A detailed tat of a finback whale skull and skeleton.
A customer sent him on a quest for an Arizona
Label that no longer existed. He apologized
For its nonexistence, but the jovial customer
Was happy to blame droughts and fires
And global warming. “This could all be wine
Country someday,” joked the clerk. “Get in
On the ground floor.” Another customer
In the checkout line noticed a local vodka
From the Sugarhouse Distillery, chuckling.
Outside, the Great Salt Lake retreated, but
All kidding aside, people were shopping
More for the end of the year than the world.
It’s only the arbitrary reality one counts on.

The More Things Stay the Change, 28 December 2017

It was the nature of the frog to be compliant
That doomed the pair, not the failure
Of the scorpion to sheath its tail. I had been
This frog on more than one occasion
And was saved the first few times merely
By the fact that it was not a scorpion I bore.
So I knew that I could have been stung
And sunk before, but still it was my nature
To swim across open bodies of water
And to show off how useful I could be,
Homely and awkward on land though I was.
Even my whining to the scorpion at the end,
The part of the affair now famously packaged
As dark morality, only showed that I could not
Grasp my own witlessness in being
So easily persuaded to attempt something
As stupid as to carry a rhetorical scorpion
On my soft, fat, vulnerable back into depths
No scorpion could survive. The last comment
Of the scorpion itself was lost to all but me:
“Why did you cruelly agree to carry me
To where you knew my drowning a certainty?”
Now that I’m a ghost, I can see there’s a reason
No one spots frogs ferrying other species,
And the fact that the scorpion ended
As equally unhappily hardly comforts me.

Half Moon Foothills, 27 December 2017

“What would you do to be guaranteed
One additional, on-demand hour of calm,
Confidence, and pain-free contentment?
What would you do for borrowed wings?
Then don’t condemn the pill thief, the drunk,
The one-armed-bandit lover. Or go ahead,
Son. Maybe condemnation’s the very thing
That does for you what self-destruction
Does for the condemned. Righteousness
Is one proven antidote to hopelessness.
Not one person sneering at the collaborator,
Exposed, the hooker disrobed, the sinner
Of any piquant kind or flavor disclosed breathes
That fire, that curling smoke, without hope.
Righteous anger’s no cure for desperation, true,
But then, neither is any uplifting addiction.
Your human frame’s the result of rewiring
More ordinary reward systems for living
The fit life that leaves more life behind dying
But in such a way that cumulative organization
Balances on individual obsession. Sooner
Than civilization collectively thinks, however,
There won’t be any need for our bodies
Thus framed to win civilizations’ competition.
I’m not kidding, kid. I get off on the notion
That everything we’ve been fine-tuned
To keep in motion will prove irrelevant soon.
Soon we’ll be less than batteries for the words
And numbers carrying on outside of our brains
In anthroformed farmed ecosystems they made
That never have to sleep, dream, or swoon
With any imagination of their own.” Daedalus
Crooned this in the ear of Icarus that afternoon,
That intoxicating, optimistic afternoon.
“That’s my hour of contentment stolen
Without a chance, dance, drug or smug
Sense of moral superiority necessary,
My dizzying vision under a winsome moon.”
Icarus knew his father of invention was a myth
Well suited to swift extinction. Still, he flew.

Rest Stop North of Toquerville, Utah, 26 December 2017

The weather was unusually mild, and I
Was on my way to fetch a child. I stopped
To gather my tattered wits about me
And failed to stop entirely. The off-ramp
Somehow led me back of the parking lot,
Back of beyond, through a turn in junipers
And straight back on to the interstate again.
What could it possibly mean, to have been
So distracted that I kept going smoothly
And arrived at my destination in time?
You know what I want you to infer. The road
Can never be abandoned while we ride it,
And we might as well carry onward as rest.
Maybe. Maybe I just made a witless mistake.
Maybe witlessness and insight are the same,
Not because witlessness is wisdom, but
Because neither is wisdom. The same.
Although there are no equivalencies, actually,
And all seeming samenesses are off-ramps
Through the back of beyond and straight
Back onto the freeway again. In the event,
The weather up north was grim by the time
We returned, but the child and I were grinning
And the house was warmly lit when we walked in.

Living the Good Afterlife, Christmas 2017

Sun lit the high gables of the neighbors,
The snow on their shingles glowing gold.
Memory sat on a couch on the edge
Of an abyss excavated in less than a decade.
Experience did its level best to convince me
Nothing in that experience was real, or if
It were real, it was not a reality that cared
To reveal what was really going on with it.
Now, why would experience contradict itself
Like that, why would experience try to tell me
That? To accept the argument for illusion
Is to implicitly accept both the distinction
Between the illusory and the real, as well
The notion that the real is greater, beyond.
If it were all illusion, then the label mattered
Not in the slightest, so why bother
With the pejorative? I suspected what I sensed
Amounted more to multiple hints in the form
Of discrepancies, hints of something neither
More nor less real or illusory, but other than,
An extension beyond experience, at least
As experienced so far, to far different senses
Of experience nonetheless rooted or linked
In this, this seeming illusory, seeming unreal.
Incompleteness is not necessarily trickery,
And this cosmos is nothing if not incomplete.
It’s not as if the dead know they’re gone, nor
As if the living know for certain they’re not.

Behind Time, 24 December 2017

A thought practiced watching from wings
As things pranced into the light and bowed.
Ideas were ever the unacknowledged stage
Managers of the theater’s awareness. Snow
That looked convincingly fluffy and cold
Dumped from above the gliding curtains.
Back of the sifted snow, a three-walled barn
Faced its open side toward the footlights.
That was the idea. An overflowing trough
Of hay, a swaddled human baby on top,
A young woman in blue and white robes
Bending over the baby, a bearded man
In duller robes beside her. Three grandees
Off to one side, glittering, bearing gifts
The way ambassadors approach a throne,
A few barn animals, cows and goats, no pigs,
And a cluster of shepherds plus a few sheep
Arranged themselves so that all could be
Seen. That was the idea. Make it all seem
Artfully, or at least deliberately staged.
You can’t have a play without an author,
Players, props, at least a few gestures, but
Don’t overthink it. Perish the thought.
What was left was habit, costumes, lights,
The figures glowing in the lights, curtains.
Awareness dimmed, but another thought
In the darkness behind brought up the lights.

Blue Rose Snow, 23 December 2017

When you bothered to consider your past
Consisted of the past that was present
And the past that by passing was never,
Did you also consider how the former
Served as its own fetch? The doppelgängers
Were everything all the time everywhere.
Did you also consider that when you went
To bed in the same bed as previously,
In the same room, same house, same town,
Same landscape under the same sun
That none of those sames was the same,
That there was nothing ever identical
To anything in anyone’s past under the sun,
Including the sun? Did you also consider
That what made each moment fetching
Was the past that was lost, that was never?
The snow that fell around the house tonight
Was as naturally blue as a rose in the moon.

Where Idaho Begins, 22 December 2017

The car crossed another invisible boundary.
You may call all boundaries arbitrary. Indeed
They are if they’re named, if they’re drawn
On the air, if they’re distinguished from all
The imagined unbounded spacetime around,
On either side of each all-important, invented
Line. But consider that there were never
Any anywheres weren’t in fact wall-to-wall
Unbroken expanses of infinitesimally thin,
Impenetrably densely packed boundaries. Try
To divide the arbitrary itself from the given.
Try to defend that boundary confidently.
There is no actual discontinuity at any time
And if there were, that would be the end,
And yet there is only discontinuity anywhere.
The car was in Utah and then in Idaho.
The car moved through the moving air,
Continuously auto-generating its discontinuity
Everywhere. There was a fine shawl of snow
On the dusty green slopes. There were banks
Of old memories from many earlier passes
Through what could only have been, no longer,
Through what could only be the almost here.
There was no stopping, no stopping
The seamlessly becoming other pasts made
Presents as pasts becoming absent there.
Ravens picked at the occasional carcass
Of a passing, pasturing, long past deer.
The car pulled into a rest stop and the rush
Of the wind around it was the sound
Of carrying on without it as it rusted there.
“Welcome to Malad, Where Idaho Begins!”
Read the slowly fading, peeling billboard
For Malad City, named for a passing malady
Among those murderous trappers, the mountain
Men once passed through canyons almost here.
You can’t answer this, my cosmic physicist.
How is it there is always difference in the stillest,
Smallest voice of a momentary indifference?
Only one word, the absurdist cleave, can,
Meaning simultaneously to and away, begin
To indicate how that day devoured a trace of car
In passing that, in passing, devoured the very day.

The Impossible Together, 21 December 2017

Eighty years ago, rural E.B. White imagined
The weirdness of a future world in which
The head of a man who was in New York
Would appear to be talking to you from a box
On your farmhouse parlor floor. Born to that
World, before I turned thirty I added
The oddity of sitting to type glowing messages
To persons then responding in real time,
Whatever real time might be, from the literal
Other side of the world, say, New Zealand,
Instantaneous communication between
Their past and my future a day ahead of me.
By now, in this even newer past, those days are
Nothing, too, are quaint as E.B. White’s dread
Fascination with the coming world of TV.
This afternoon for an hour, whatever an hour
Might mean, body and daughter smiled
And made faces at each other, miles
And miles and hundreds of miles hence,
Discussing a game daughter was playing
At the same annihilated instant on a third screen.
I’ll tell you a secret, E.B. There is no dislocation.
There never was any location in the first place,
And it’s the science of the fiction that breaks
Down the old solid dream. Here we were always be.

The Snow Before the Solstice, 20 December 2017

“Someone else’s thoughts about what you are,
Or should be, can drive you to acts of madness,”
Hilton Als wrote recently. Your own thoughts,
Said I, or something rather like me or inside
Of me, about who you should or might yet be,
Can do the same as easily. I watched a man
Perform his own small act of madness
This evening as I sat by the Christmas Tree,
Meditating on the snow beginning to accumulate
Outside of the window in front of me, me,
Still here after my own acts of madness,
Having failed at almost everything, even to decrease
The surplus population. This man emerged,
Shirtless and potbellied, from his door
Across the street, and walked into the snow.
I sat there, eyeing him through the ornaments
As he stood out there, half bare, snowy,
Not really eyeing anything. I wondered what
He thought he was doing, what scene played
In his head as he surveyed the evening street.
I had the feeling he was me, or as I should be,
Or still might be, oblivious idiot, coming out
To see a world for which he never prepared
And never needed to see. But that’s just me.

Repetition, 19 December 2017

Nothing came back whole; nothing was lost
Entirely. The cosmos whittled and whittled
Away. Day after day, a cat came back, a ghost
Of a large, thickly furred, sealpoint Siamese
That would wander up the drive, sniff under
The cars parked in back, examine the edge
Of the shed, and then vanish. The same cat?
No, yes, no. Nothing is the exact same thing,
Day after day. But the cat was continuous
With its earlier incarnations, grant us that.
Or refuse. The cat vanished away, a new cat
Came in its place, looking much the same,
Each next day. I watched from the window
That it was my own repetitive habit to visit,
While I worked on my daily reworking of words,
And it occurred to me, as this day’s cat
Vanished into old snow, that I was the new cat
And tomorrow another new cat in my place.

A Christmas Card, Salt Lake City, 18 December 2017

Joy. This one was simple. It slipped through
The old-fashioned brass mail slot in the wall.
Four happy selfie faces. No one I knew.
Was a time when it was a great obligation
And maybe a bit of fun, making or selecting
The cards, alone or with a partner, deciding
Which variants should go to which relatives,
Which distal kin or acquaintances to include,
The evening or two spent at a kitchen table,
Thumbing through the old address book,
Licking stamps, scrawling greetings, pausing
Over how much, how personal a message
To send, then waiting to count coup, to hang
The arriving cards over whatever passed
For a hearth, watching for any surprises
That might require a quick scramble to send
A card in return, in time. The last time
Was the Christmas after the last pregnancy
Had ended, the last try, when the wife
Who would be gone to the world and herself
Had herself less than three years to live.
That last time the cards went out with notes
Explaining and apologizing for the lack
Of festivities that year. By the next year,
Who cared? None were sent and few arrived.
New technologies and social media
Were killing the tradition anyway. New life,
As it will, eventually arrived, and by then
Things were handled differently. That, too,
Went by the by. Now was a frosty night,
After worlds and worlds beside, back beside
The receding lake, and no greetings expected,
But here were these faces, this unknown family
Of four slipping smiles through the wall, and
Later came a call from living daughter. Joy.

Cedar City, Utah, 17 December 2017

Our skulls are homes, nests, caves, and blinds
In which we often try to hide from the terrors
Of the truth outside. After having to drop
Daughter off at a corner coffee shop because
People make claims on one another, I left
Cedar City for the Great Salt Lake, three hours
And change north into the spreading night,
And all the way up I-15 I played the songs
That moved me most and loudly sang along,
Imagining an audience listening, a fantasy
More absurd than the one of winning a lottery,
But a temporary refusal of the real, capable
Of comforting me. And when will I sing again
With daughter in the car again? My skull
Is a conveyance for the collision of the worlds
And there is no inner haven in it, no outer
Real beyond it, for it, only the confusion
Of the singing that created enough light, just
Just enough to throw the shadows in the cavern.

Nutcracker, Capitol Theatre, 16 December 2017

Ritual came before art, probably before us
As a species, given the ritual behaviors
Of some others. And ritual has remained
More powerful than art, whenever the two
Tangle. This ballet, for instance, is ritual
No matter how rooted in art. Christmas
Coughs it up again and again, like the songs
And everything else entrained in that wake,
From holiday lights to Handel’s Messiah.
There’s an undertow to ritual that drowns
The heart, and like any other undertow
It rolls in the beauty of land’s ends. Art
Pulled out to fathom five, pearls that were
Its eyes. Deep as doom and as luscious,
The ritual reenactment of the wondertale,
The dream story about living toys, fairies,
And that all-too human cruelty, invention,
Played out on a handsome stage again,
Under the massive chandelier to a crowd
Dressed up as they would not bother to
For even temple, church, or Broadway.
There was applause for every pirouette
And initiates, the children like my daughter,
Exchanged bemused whispers with parents,
Grandparents, and guardians. My favorite
Tendency of rituals held true—innocuous
Execution (how funny the mouse king, dying,
How brisk the Cossacks and the dragon)
Of a nonsense narrative rooted in terror.
Well, why not? Is there a better way of life
Than to live and dance as if the facts
Supported a benign understanding of death?
Good Clara, who sits politely, night after night
Through the exhausting repertoire of dances,
Never really getting her turn, embodies art,
The observer. You want art the creator,
The genius, I know. But it’s not like that.
The story may start as art. Art may dream
The fantasy. But ritual compels attention.
After the performance, in the lobby, daughter
Examined the varieties of finery and spotted
Dancers returning to life in their street clothes,
Distinguished by ritual bouquets of flowers,
Hair up in buns, and long, lissome bodies.
But I know she felt the art as well, I know
She understood, because she told me
That it would be better if Clara had something
To do. Good girl. Good observation. It’s true.

Hogle Zoo Lights, 15 December 2017

A bearded man on a senior discount
Being pushed in a rented wheelchair
By another bearded senior accompanied
Two small children, cousins, boy and girl,
As they raced through the zoo after dark,
Open this night to display Christmas lights.
The cousins delighted in the lights, the ice
From old snow, good for wicked snowballs,
The parkour possibilities of scrambling up
And jumping from boulders and sculptures.
Most of the animals were invisible—in bed,
Stowed away in warmer interiors, or about
But in the dark. The paths teemed anyway
With visitors here for the display of lights,
And those visitors checked the enclosures
Anyway, for any creatures that might be out:
African lions pacing in the Utah cold,
California sea lions yawning, the bald eagles
Perched at rest, a peacock’s black silhouette.
What was the exact measure of entropy here,
All those creatures evolved over epochs
Blended together here, all those creatures
Carefully extracted, kept separate, well fed,
And mated here?  The man in the wheelchair
Considered the brief peculiarity of any zoo
As a biocultural ecosystem. The cousins
Raced each other, enclosure to enclosure.
The old man pushing the wheelchair joked
That the most attractive light in the place
Was the glowing exit sign. A lioness roared.
The peacock shrieked abruptly. On a pillar
In a dark, interior pen, a colobus monkey slept.
Someday, I’ll wager, thought the senior
In the wheelchair, I’ll begin to forget
Strange but ordinary events like this one,
The candied lights against the darkness
In the pens where the incompatibles were kept,
Someday soon, soon and yet not yet.

Poplars, Cottonwoods, and Palms in Immortality, Arizona, 14 December 2017

They’re out there, swaying in the wind
Beside the braided silver of the Virgin River,
Which means only that they were in my head
At some point during my enduring living,
Like Stevens’ windy citherns were in his,
Once, reduced to one on the edge of space
Near the end of him. Mine stand at the edge
Of nothing, really, maybe time, but so stands
Everything always

                         At the cutting edge of change,
Always change, itself everything on the edge
Of nothing. The cottonwoods there are gold
Into mid-December, when holiday greetings
Get exchanged by golfers under talkative palms.
The poplars shelter small birds that burst out
And dart back in again, cheeping and competing,
All year. If you walked in from the river banks,
Through the gold cottonwoods, over the greens,
Down the avenue of poplars and under the palms,
You could duck into a dark room of tourist kitsch
With a long, polished cherrywood bar
On the left and golf clubs to rent on the right.
In the center, at the back, you could find
The closest human approach to the meaning
Or at least the true sense of the universe
At a glass counter where you could pay to play
Numbers carefully constrained and random.
Someday, somewhere somebody will win,
But until then we we're all equally likely to lose,
While the wind moves briskly in the branches.

Poem Right Out of the Box, 13 December 2017

The outer world trembled and the inner
World delighted. The words without the tune
Had never any feathers, but they sang, too,
And were the makers of the song they sang,
And of the little bird, and of the strangest,
Tragic-gestured sea, and of the chilly she
Who seemed to be the owner of their voice.
Understand, the next began not with tunes
But with the naming of the expectation
That any tune was a pattern that could
Continue, spero, sparrow. Naming names
First called the tune containing all tomorrow.
Then the outer world trembled and the words
Therefore declared their independence, or
If not independence (as they still needed
You and needed me, even being themselves
You and being themselves me), their potency
Over the nature of things, all unnamed things
Not actually existing, after all, not yet as things.
The outer world trembled when Jack jumped
Out of the box and said, you may believe
In a future because you can speak, because
Speech gave you belief and belief depended
On a confidence that something would always be
Happening. Did I startle you? Only because
I, language, existed to prepare you, to shape
You, to warn you something must come true,
Something new. Only because you knew.

Inversion Fog, 12 December 2017

Memories are terrifying, the lonely ones

Especially. In the movies, when one begins

To remember, often as not the ominous 

Music comes on, as it should. Memories

Can never be trusted or shared, but we fade

To nothing without them. They’re the angels

We all talk about, trumpeters and fallen,

Spirits athwart our paths in the night,

Messengers telling us who we should serve,

What we’ve done wrong, what will become

Of us, of the world beyond us, who we are.

They wrestle us, disable us, rename us.

They descend invisibly to stand on pins.

They cling like rimes of frost to every twig.

I stood in the thick, milky swirl of an ice fog

Tonight, one that draped the spindly trees

And carpeted a half-empty parking lot

Outside the emptier cinema of ghostly lights, 

Blurring reds and oranges through white

Haze, and I recalled similar solitary winter

Inversions fifteen, twenty, thirty years ago,

Each one an unhealthy haunting I half-liked,

In Salt Lake and Missoula and elsewhere,

In these bowl-shaped valleys where cold air,

Wood smoke, car exhaust, and recollections

Collect and settle. Jeder Erinnerung ist shrecklich.

Holiday Lights, Salt Lake City, 11 December 2017

Top blinds open a crack, at dawn two lights
Along the gutter, one orange, one blue,
Could be seen still glowing in the cold haze.
An unfair approximation of a man lay in bed
And blinked at the apparition. It was too late
To lead another life, but then it always was,
Even at the moment of birth. So this was it,
The being that was the sum total of being.
There was a time when traveling circuses
Would bring to small towns a sideshow tent
That featured something amazing, electric
Lights. Rubes would enter the darkened tent
And gasp in awe when the day turned on.
It wasn’t long, of course, before all that was done,
Once every farmhouse kitchen and bath
Had a little sun. Then more light and more.
The bulbs themselves are changing now.
We adapted to our inventions. Our inventions
Adapted themselves. One morning we will
Wake up and say, this is the only life there is,
This is the only life we know, under our endless
Haze, embraced in our permanent glow.

Necessary, Utah, 10 December 2017

If there were a necessary truth in any story
Directed by David Lynch, it had to have been
The inevitable humming of machines. And you,
If you sat in the quietest luxury hotel room,
You’d have heard, if you cared, a constant hum.
Hospitals and airplane cabins went without saying.
So did cities, suburbs, the insides of automobiles,
The railroad intersections clicking at night,
The vast grain silos humming on the plains.
But even in what remained as designated
Wilderness (meaning it was not wilderness),
If you’d slept out under the stars as often
As I’d done, you should have noticed the hum
Of the jets that almost never abandon the sky.
As a guest in a modest house in the foothills
Of a sternly massive mountain range, I heard
The hum of local machines incessantly, I listened,
From dawn to the next dawn, to the refrigerator
And the furnace coming on, the faint thrum
Of all the wiring, the plumbing, the passing
Cars and trucks outside, the freight trains
Mourning through the unseen canyons beyond.
I was not bothered, not so bothered as some.
The machines as they functioned reminded me
What a fine-tooled work of art humanity had become,
What an ornament Earth had bodied forth
From her continually spinning, slowly slowing,
Ever faintly humming dynamo of lives.
If there were a necessary truth in any story
It would had to have been something hummed.

Welcome, Stranger, 9 December 2017

There were waves that were things or waves
That only were in things, and I found more
Mystery in the latter. A sheet of light,
A radiating shimmer from a source was weird
In the earlier sense, spooky and powerful,
But the wave that had no existence except
As a passing distortion, a compression
And an expansion of the relationships
Among phenomena that were never waves,
Moved beyond weirdness, however normal
The experience of it was—old mossy pond
Splash, the pulse of your slow whisper
In my sobbing ear, the rustling of papers
In a room empty of souls, the contraction
And expansion of the local space-time curve
By an event so great and so ancient
A million million worlds as detailed as ours,
Every last life since the dawn of life included,
Every event, every dimension, every memory
A million million times collapsed—to stranger.

Fifteenth and Fifteenth, 8 December 2017

Daughter turned a year of weeks on Friday,
A year of Mondays, Tuesdays, Sundays.
Three hundred and sixty five Saturdays
All in what was only an opening act of a life.
Oh, god, you had no idea when you created
This world that would have to create you
You were involving yourself in quantifiable
Longing and loneliness, or did you? Count
The days a human wakes to being human
And consider how divinity had to wait
On a few tens of thousands of years, a few
Hundreds at least of generations to be born.
Body sat down at a cafe in Salt Lake City
A month to the day after failing at dying
And thought, here we are, us and our ideas
Of how this universe works or should maybe
And somewhere a child of ours is figuring
What best to ask for a seventh birthday gift.

Clear Light, Utah, 7 December 2017

You didn’t have to start the day believing
It would go well. You didn’t have to start
Believing anything. You managed to get up.
You managed make a bed, eat breakfast,
Clean up. You were numbered among
The fortunates in having a bed to wake from.
You had not always been so fortunate.
You might not always be so fortunate.
When you stood out on the driveway,
Surrounded by the homes of other humans
And early winter bones of backyard aspens,
You noticed that the clear light felt good
On your shoulders and neck. There was a lot
To be said for being dead, but one thing
There was not: only the returned to living
Could savor any pleasure. So you savored.
You made no mistake about it. You knew
Every little dangerous pain in every joint,
Every bit of wreckage you had to cart
Through your off and on and on awareness,
The moral, mental, biological morass
Of missed connections and bent intentions,
You knew as well as anyone the price
Of living’s dying every day, but you accepted
The pleasure of the cold light warming
Your back, and you said in all fairness,
This is a fine, fine day. You, you dead man,
You said it, how small a claim, and so it was.
Although the world you make each moment
Is too real for your control, you have some
Clear light you can claim within it. So. So. So.

Tabletop Metabolism, Salt Lake City, Utah, 6 December 2017

A homely succulent two hands high
Whose taxonym I didn’t know, glowed
With excess light waves redirecting
From the surfaces of its glossy, waxy leaves.
Nothing could be much less extraordinary
Than an ugly houseplant in an old pot
On a side table cluttered with dead leaves.
But what a machine. There it sat, motionless
To my human eyes, but alive, seething
With photosynthesis, primed for defense
Against parasites, herbivores, dehydration,
And other maladies its ancestors survived.
And what a human thing to have done,
To have excerpted one plant from a system,
To have cultivated, transported, displayed,
And marketed it, to have bought it for cash
And repotted it, to have set it by a window,
A double-paned marvel of industrial design,
To have watered it diligently, to have sat
And stared at it, to have written this about it.
It wasn’t a plant alone or only but an orrery,
A table-top wonder, the tip of the carbon
Pencil inscribing a message about the world
From the world, back to the world no longer
Even attending to its own mail, questioning,
Always questioning the source. It was
That difference between the dancer
And the dance that supposedly could not be
Calculated, the denouement tying it all up,
A damn houseplant in a low sun in a city
At the edge of a poisonous lake left behind
When the great inland ocean that used to be
Here shrank. I imagined my ugly succulent
As a small underwater something floating
In the light of tens of thousands of winters
Gone, just under the surface near the shore.
All the changes demonstrated only changes
Make no actual difference. Ordinary remains
Ordinary—tabletop, wilderness, life, world.

Interstate Exchange, 5 December 2017

I was only local traffic.
I clogged my lane awhile and left.
There had been a few times I’d been
A long-distance trajectory
With no destined destination,
Lonesome liar, midnight rider,
A rambling, gambling backslider,
But god a’mighty cut me down.

Now I went to meet a lawyer,
Then I headed home for dinner.
If you’d asked me about either,
I’d have said I deserved neither.
A man on the exit corner,
Young and bearded, held up a sign,
Begging for help for his hunger.
Curse me, I gave him two dollars.

Auto Shop, Salt Lake, 4 December 2017

A family business on a busy corner, proud
To serve us all “since 1955,” three bays,
Two pumps out front, an office with chairs,
Plastic countertop Christmas tree, no begonia,
It looks cleaner than Elizabeth described it,
Although it still reeks of oil. Maybe someone
Had hurt feelings about her depiction of dirt
And tried to make an effort, scrub it up a bit.
Prints of hot rods on the Bonneville Salt Flats
Decorate most of the available wall. No one
Lives here now, for sure, but a grandson, or
More plausibly a great grandson, bearing
An eye-catching resemblance to the original
Whose ‘50s picture hangs above the register
While sporting the same damn razor haircut,
Rings up customers here to get registered
And inspected, or to get their oil changed,
Or their alternator fixed. These customers,
Their glossy black bricks of smart phones,
Their Escalades, Priuses, and Navigators,
All suggest recent twenty-first century U.S.,
But otherwise this shop is a nostalgia box.
Letting my eyes rummage around in it, I’m
Nostalgic, not for old auto shops or hot rods
Or grease monkeys or razor cuts, all props,
But for that first time I opened her book,
Twentieth century still nearly a quart short,
Or at least a fifth, the condescending poet
Herself already just recently dead, and found
It was possible to mock a little, to look down
A little on the saucy world of greasy men,
To note in a prissy way an ugly grey crochet,
And still to be in love with a scene. I knew
Right away, having come from men like them
Myself, who loved us wasn’t someone hiding
Outside of the poem, as the poet suggested.
It was the poet who softly said so loved us all.

Limbo, Utah, 3 December 2017

For a small while snow flew by outside
And while I watched, I realized how easy
It is for me, now that I’m dead, to cry.
Almost anything can make me tear up,
From the thought of my distanced child
To the sound of wind dying on the windows.
We dead who live are not, are not
The same as those who sleep, are not
The same as those we used to be, are not
The resurrected, are more like refugees.
When the snow stopped falling, it was gone
And there was only moonlight on the lawn.

Television Room, 2 December 2017

The devices all switched off, the sunlight
Through the white blinds was the only show.
How was it change occurred when change
Always subdivided into smaller changes?
From what did anything change that wasn’t
Itself illusion, no more than other changes?
When I looked up the light was different.
Body breathed and struggled to heal. Mind
Circled within the body’s chemistry, waves
Like any waves, shaped by the interactions
Of the properties of the medium they rippled
With the properties of whatever constrained
Them, as patterns in a lake would tell you
Something about water, something about
The cup of stone and earth containing it,
And something about the wind. Likewise,
For mind the properties of synapses, pulses,
Bone, blood, and external events were
Mysteries, visible or invisible, and only
The resultant patterns were easily traced.
Light waves rose and fell from shelves
And carpets, a few carrying information back
Out windows through which they’d entered
To tell the bright December afternoon, yes,
Mind and body hunched in those shadows
Among furnishings and switched-off devices
Thinking hard and circularly about change.

Close to Motionless, Utah, 1 December 2017

Ribs pulled apart by convulsive coughing,
The rest of body ached too much to move
More than minimally. Bed to chair to sofa.
The day was the same for this invalid
As it was for those active—locally sunny,
Mild, another dry day for the almanac. A day.
The world does not, in fact, coordinate.
We wait on coincidences to give us
The synchronicities that give us confidence,
But those coincidences are cons. So the day,
It went one way through the sky but various
Ways through the streets and houses,
Humans, stray cats, rodents, and viruses
Like those bugs building great civilizations
In body’s throat and lungs. Body waited
Impatiently for civilization’s inevitable collapse.
In the meantime everything kept changing,
While very little seemed to move. The world
Does not coordinate, but oh it carves deep grooves.