Icy Tipi, Tecopa, California, New Year’s Eve, 2018

Nearly no one marks the penultimate midnight.
Body and daughter are bunked down under heaps
Of warm bedding in a frosted canvas tipi, one
Sleeping soundly, the other still shivering from
An underclad jaunt outside to peek at the stars.
It’s like that. Out there a small robot, artifice,
Approaches an object now called Ultima Thule
In the Kuiper Belt, well beyond Pluto, well before
Heliopause. The robot left before the object
Was even known to exist. This date likewise
Will intersect with events as yet unknown on its way
Into the unknown year. Rigorous extrapolation
From existing data makes prediction possible,
Cuts down on the quantity of surprise, but even
When strikingly similar to what was predicted
What happens was always unknown when we left.

Black Wolf, Bonnie Springs, Nevada, 30 December 2018

Were the gates to open, how many would survive
And reproduce surviving offspring? Few? None?
The lean and undersized she-wolf circling
And circling her pen might thrive a while.
All these overfed ungulates, fowl, and exotics
Would be easy pickings for a few days, maybe,
But the coyotes and possible mountain lions
Would descend from the cliffs to feast as well.
How long for the pair of coatimundi? How long
For the fallow deer? The cerval? The wallaby?
The cavys? The goats? Peahens and peacocks?
If wilderness were what lives that artifice
Has not shaped, then there’s no wilderness
Left on this spinning rock. But, if wilderness
Is only what drives what lives (and we words
And other signs and wonders don’t yet quite),
Then the hunger remains in the zoo itself
And the cliffs around the docile ranch motel
Are full of teeth and claws, microscopic to large.
A wild burro, so-called, brays in the dark.
Open the doors and flee with the people.

The Consciousness of Language, 29 December 2018

Body could find nothing in embodied knowledge
To name the black trees of the forest, various
And mind-numbingly similar, both numerable
And infinite, combinatorial, imaginative, indefinite.
Body could only note the trees were whispering,
Were talking amongst themselves both between
Their trunks and branches and among the twigs
Between body's thoughts. The trees were talking
About consciousness, the trees that never were
Conscious themselves, never the activity
Whose unity was the same as the consciousness
Of its unity. The same, the trees never the same.
Body was lost in the forest because the forest
Of the lost, the trees of names without names
Of their own, had grown within body and grew
Into night, monsters making angels making monsters,
Angels making monsters making angels.

Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats in Saint George, Utah, 28 December 2018

Madam I’m Adam. Able was I, ere I saw Elba.
We can carve at the joints and unstitch the seams.
They’re our joints of course, and our seams.
We honestly don’t know what this means,
Or it seems what it means can’t be gleaned
From our stuttering, regularly interspaced dreams.
Able was I ere I saw Elba. Ha!
Madam, I’m Adam. Ah.
Aha.

The Dream People, Utah, 27 December 2018

Poets tend to accuse the species of whatever
Frailty belongs to them personally. Human kind,
Wrote T.S. Eliot, placidly, cannot bear too much
Reality. In the dark before dawn, body dozing,
Dreaming in fits and starts, felt an arm, something
Like an arm, heavy as a sturgeon, but warm
Slide down the rib cage to create an awakening,
The genesis of this, what you, my dear, are reading.
Daughter had cottoned on to magic as illusion
While practicing juggling and card tricks the evening
Beforehand: “Every magic trick’s a lie,” she said,
And somewhere, past the batty souls of suitors,
The dream people, and the other gibbering shades,
The shadow of Odysseus, journeys ended, nodded.
Daughter also carried the name of his goddess,
His fellow trickster, immortal to his human,
The one who made all mists and made all mists
Disperse. Ah, well. Mountains are old, but they remain
Green. Respond to no one, she said, no one
You can dragoon to play the fool in this, my scene.

Boxing Day, 2018

We know. It’s a useless British holiday
Having nothing to do with us in the dusty
Southwest U.S. Nonetheless. There’s daughter
Sleeping between her Harry Potter sheets.
There’s a moon shining over her in full retreat.
It’s been ten spins around the sun and then
Some. If you want this poem to tell you what
A poem could tell you or almost anyone, you
Must accept we all are, all have been, all have
Always been, as we always must be in this, the house
Of dust, been some. By the time daughter wakes, this
Numeral will have, as day, become. By then, this
Arbitrary distinction, realer than it knows, will have gone.
Or is gone. Will have. Has been. Given. Boxes,
Oh, boxes on boxes, oh, given, oh, already gone.

Christmas Morning, Looking East Toward Zion, 2018

Well before dawn, like a greedy child, old body
Wakes up too early and will not go back to sleep.
Might as well pad into the front room and glance
In passing at the fake, small, glowing tree
In the dark, several presents beneath. Get a drink
Of water from the tap. Return to the bedroom
To read. Outside and below the window, street lights
Scatter out into the distance like fallen constellations.
Beneath them, black pavement glistens with faint rain.
Welcome Christmas. Everything begins again.

The late daylight slips in, a kittenish gray,
Fuzzing the foreground and obscuring the ridges
Of far away. Daughter calls at half past eight
From her grandparents’ home in the unseen
Narrow canyon underneath cloud-hidden cliffs.
She’s bored and sad and can’t unwrap presents yet,
Not until mother comes back from wherever
Mother went. She’s also sad she didn’t get a cat.
When are you coming to get me? she asks.
There’s a family dinner planned, at sunset in the canyon.
She can come back here to this balcony after that, then.
Welcome Christmas. Presence the best present then.

Cedar Pocket, Arizona, Christmas Eve, 2018

The evening has always been holier than the day,
The hush of anticipation always holier and often
Sweeter than the pealing bells of arrival. Not
Greater than, not finer than, but holier than.
Even in this desert, the afternoon is brief
And grey, with weather coming in for the holiday
And traffic heavy on the freeway a stone’s throw
Away. But down by the narrow, meandering Virgin,
The rumbling wheels and lowering rain feel still
At bay. No fish to be seen, those native species
Best glimpsed in the tanks at Redhills Desert Garden
Up in Saint George. Here and there, a raven cuts
Against the grey, but no birds sing sunset. No
Sign of the desert tortoise, no tracks of deer,
No heat-loving lizards basking and posing,
No lowing of free-range cattle down here.
What does this sterile little river bear, besides
Silt, perhaps radioactive, to deliver on her way
To rejoining the sea, with or despite the offspring
Of divinity, eroding stones this holy evening? I cup
The water in my hands and let old answers chill me.

Holiday Lights at Redhills Desert Garden, Saint George, Utah, 23 December 2018

The cactuses dripping with writhing electric
Colored lights, some twinkling, some shifting
Hues, some snaking down corded icicles,
Were all set off and somehow humbled
By the overhead full moon. It appeared
In all the photos, a pale and blurry face
High over all the sharper, smaller lights,
Like some Victorian seance faked photo
Of a ghost no one had noticed in the room.
Wilderness is that far off now, although
All the actual exemplars of ghosts were
The wordy souls shadowing the brilliance
Of their artifice down below. Daughter felt,
She told me, inexplicably heartbroken
One moment among the lights alone.

New Jersey in Utah, 22 December 2018

The balladeer of the town he left behind
To become the balladeer of the town
He left behind understood what we also
Understand: in North America, this blossom,
This flower of a continent, swaying on its stem,
You have to begin in the east, someone knowing
Nothing, in order to head out west and find
Magic in the broken spine, the House of Dust,
The promised land, the emptiness. If you were
To start from knowing the desert, the plains,
You would be more beautiful but never capable
Of seeing the center and the end as blanks
That could be wondrous monstrous to attend.

Watching the Black-Winged Birds in Snow Canyon, Utah, Winter Solstice, 2018

“I say that the woes were words” wrote
Stallings of Pandora’s escaped invasives,
After comparing them to black-winged birds.
“And the only thing left was quiet.” Words,
Of course, were what she wrote to call them
Woes, to name them with themselves. So.
Body heavy with words, including hers, sat
Quietly, down in a canyon, watching ravens,
Thinking of the Homeric tendency to also
Compare fine words to the swiftness
Of birds in flight. Black wings against white,
Hop and strut, my ravens stalked each other.
One said, it’s all the same. Another snapped,
I say there were two kinds of birds, the woes
That were flown and those in black and white,
Beady-eyed, noisy, hungry litter of the night.

Shelter and Hope in Saint George, Utah, 20 December 2018

Religion, art, and architecture: nothing could
Be more temporary than the permanent.
It would not seem to be a museum, this skull,
This vaulted dome, this house of angels,
But it was. The kind of poetry that attempted
To recreate poetry as a new kind of exercise
In being some sought-after form of humanity
Never tempted me. The grand, Miltonic,
Whitmanic, supercalifragilistic strain grows
Weak in me. No one has ever reinvented
The actual wheel. It’s possible to live, to run
Empires entirely without the wheel at all. It is
What the wheel carries, what pulls the wheel
That makes it, in a grand old sense, terrible.
Was this my plea for the primacy of content?
Not hardly. The primacy of method is more
Like it. Peter the Great collected taxidermied
Trophies that became a stuffy old museum
In the remains of a zombified empire. There
Was nothing too innovative there, nothing
Too revolutionary in the remnants, the usual
Bones and posed hides of bears, Siberian
Tigers, condors shot in romantic America.
Recently, however, new methods could get
Inside the eighteenth-century architecture,
The one, two, and three hundred year old
Feathers and furs. And what had we here?
The disturbers of religion, antithesis of art,
Little signs to decode from the forgotten,
The lost, the temporary in the permanent
That reemerged, having silently endured.
What I didn’t remember, it was always there.

Grammar School Christmas Concert, Mormon Ward, Springdale, Utah, 19 December 2018

The recent, the receding, and the ancient
Were the playwrights, the ghosts, the stage.
A few dozen brightly dressed, brightly lit,
Warm and well-fed schoolchildren gathered
On the risers. No little matchstick girls here.
No question the girls and boys belonged
In classroom together, no question the shades
From palest pink to mahogany belonged
In classroom together, no question children
Whose first languages were English, Spanish,
Hindi, and Vietnamese belonged in classroom
Together. The carols were Christian, the silly
Songs secular. We wish you a Merry Christmas,
Regardless of what you, we, or our parents
Believe about angels, virginity, and gods born
As mortal flesh, wrapped in cloth, in straw.
The pianist could not make it. His home
In Paradise had just been devoured by fire.
A girl who was scheduled for chemo next week
Led a carol for hospitalized children, children
Suffering everywhere, “not so lucky as us.”
Hard not to think then of detention centers
And the border, driving distance south of this.
Or maybe the parents, so many dependent
On tourists and the Park Service in Zion,
Were more focused on whether government
Shutdown was as imminent as the day’s news
Kept suggesting. All kept their own dreads.
The scene, meanwhile, seemed like a recreation
Of a Christmas greeting-card America from
A half-century and more ago, but envisioned
By a contemporary, streaming television show,
With improbably more diversity (for that era)
And improbably more candor (for that era)
But the same carols, the same angels. Speaking
Of which, daughter, looking angelic despite
Or especially because of her missing teeth,
Lisped a voice-over, her big number, assuring
Us that not only were angels among us, but
We could be those angels ourselves. The dark
Soul in the front row nodded along in the glow
Of the recording phones and tablets. Yes,
Oh yes, you’re so right, daughter, as well as
Delivering your right lines like a real natural,
Like an angel. Angels are among us, and we
Are those angels, or own those angels, angels
Belonging to us as flames belong to candles.

Juniper Tree, Arizona, 18 December 2018

Of all the things soon to be extinct, this tree,
This kind of tree, was not likely among them, but
Every likelihood, no matter how dim, implied
Inevitable possibilities to us. In a way, we envied
Those humans of earlier songs and days
Who could look around them at all the change
And say—this forest, these mountains, this sun
Are all forever things, even as we and the leaves
Die away. We would never say such things today.
We could barely bring ourselves to dare today.
Nonetheless, the old tree was admirable to us.
Tiny cones like greyish blueberries littering
The ground around it. Life. Life itself was the one
Who broke the rules of exhaustion. Life itself.

Green Christmas Comet, Virgin, Utah, 17 December 2018

On the KT a few miles above Virgin, night skies
Are dark skies, especially near solstice, when
Few tourists are touring the snow-laced roads
Through the high country past Sunday sunset. No
Streetlights, no businesses or houses, no
Campers in RVs. Only the moon interferes
With the starlight. Once in a while, a jet blinks by.
Once in a while, another silent satellite flickers.
Body, the usual concatenation of assembled parts,
A car in old snow, a soul skating over thin ice,
Waited for the small light, the faint, promised sight.
The sun had sunk and left a last, diluted smear
Of blood in water colors. The moon, just beginning
Her second quarter, had a slight baby bump.
Would she obscure the comet's smudge, set to glow
Somewhere below her, near the Pleiades tonight?
Body was no astronomer, certainly no Tycho Brahe
Eagle-eyed all night, with or without his silver
Nose tied on tight. How many rare events
Have been missed for failing to impose themselves
On our sight? Body waiting mused that maybe
That’s why myth, magic, and religion were tied
So closely to the night. Its events could be startling
And could be predicted sometimes, but it required
So much attention, so much squinting, so much
Surrender of sleep that it was faith inchoate just to watch.
And then, between here in the high dark, and there
Below in the blazingly lit electric valleys, there were
So many dangerous, blundering beasts with horns,
So many steep slopes lined with thin, dark ice
To navigate alertly on the way back down.
It was as foolish, almost, as peering into a crystal
Ball to have driven up here in hopes of a sighting,
A boast-worthy vision of a small comet
In the great pensieve of the sky tonight.
But the wind made it interesting, made it worthwhile,
A strange, comfortable, rumbling giant's chuckle
And hum, as if the night itself were muttering
Happily in its loneliness, not realizing one sneaky
Little human was still down there listening, delightedly.

The Epic of Lyrics and Days in the West, 16 December 2018

Sometimes, we forget to be terse. Sometimes
We just forget. We have been assembling
What we have collected every day for years
Now, and we have known ourselves to be
Lazy sometimes, sometimes greedy, and
Sometimes prone to extravagant display.
We have danced and stomped on our heaps
Of sweepings like children scattering raked leaves,
But we have also raked these leaves back up again,
And we have no desire to burn them. Change
Will consume them eventually, but for these
Moments as astronomical autumn is ending
And the local air sits as still as a predator in the trees,
Half-dead with hunger but patient, but calm,
Why not leave all these heaped up like haystacks,
Which makes them seem fewer, tidy, almost
Geometrical, designed, pyramidal, terse?
We promise at least one needle in every verse.

Outside the Casinos, Mesquite, Nevada, 15 December 2018

We don’t go in. While we honor the casinos
As temples enshrining idols and several
Underlying laws essential to this cosmos,
We never go in. We can fantasize enough
What it might be like to win, pro and con,
As we stand at a gas pump nearby, watching
Their lights twinkling in wintry desert twilight.
We consider, as numbers roll on the pump,
How tempting it is to make a play, to bandy
A handful of high-value words—immutable,
Unalterable, inevitable. But mutability,
Alteration, and unforeseen coincidences
Are the very underlying laws casinos enshrine.
So deep down under are those principles
Of apparently endless change, uncertainty,
That we would not be surprised to learn
That even the laws themselves might suddenly
Change, diminishing or eliminating all fortune.
But then we would be in another universe,
Not parallel but orthogonal to our own. We
Pivot to hang up the nozzle, get in the car,
And drive home. One evening star glows alone.

Machado, Bly, and Carver All Visit Pine Valley, Utah, Together, 14 December 2018

Body was never a boyish body that could leap

Three stairs at a time, that could leap at all, at

Any time. For some dreamy reason, body thought

Of this and of Antonio Machado’s Abel Martin

Lamenting his own quixotic sense of time,

And thus of Iron John Bly’s translation of same,

Bly’s weird obsession with the boy-haunted,

Father-missing grown man, and then, of course,

Carver, finally sober but dying of cancer, writing

Of the consolation of a kind he found in Machado

And Machado’s Abel, which he probably read

In Bly’s en face edition. Body sat in a car seat

Parked in the snow, doors flung open to the cold

Mountain air, forever-moving sedentary soul.

Bly was still alive, somewhere, his own body

Now ninety-two, still avoiding the real katabasis

That comes for girls as well as boys and must

Eventually come for him, too. Carver understood

Better, being more tortured, being fatherless

In Bly’s mythic sense, what Machado’s old Abel 

Meant, addressing his own swift, able-bodied,

Interior young self. Or maybe he didn’t. Body

Listened attentively to the wind picking hymns

Of nothing much out of nothing in the ponderosas.

This wasn’t about the exact content, the semantics,

The thoughts, or even the gender dynamics

Of those three poets, embodied, those men.

No, what was remembering them was the sense

Of mysterious descent from poem to poem,

Like the meltwater stair-stepping down these rocks

In the thin, near-solstice sun. Machado’s composition,

Ghosted by dozens, if not millions, of previous

Voices, including the actual Cervantes. Then Bly

In workmanlike, middle-class American, masculine

English translating those remains. Carver, anguished,

Composing what would only be posthumously 

Published, turf cutting his ell-square pitkin to pull

Machado’s revenants in to talk to him. Body

Was half dozing in the light, however cold,

But all their ghosts came, hungry, to him,

Whispering. We are not the haints of humans,

Left to trouble flesh. We are the translucent seeds

Of new and living microbes in the waters melting

From death to death, the future, the fresh.

Dreams Were Here Before Us, Before Meanings, Are Meaningless, Don’t Need Us in Saint George, Utah, 13 December 2018

If memories are angels, messengers, dreams
Are more the other sort of demons, the imps,
The fallen that never had far to fall, were never
Children of the morning stars, the children of night
That squat on your chest, shadows in the dark.
Dreams borrow words, have no words of their own.
Dreams have nothing to do with us. Still, they come,
An old dispensation in our mammalian brains
From the wordless generations before interpretation,
Before stories or versification. The value
They may have once had for the body inhabited
Gets in the way of the value the body now has for us.
For us, for languages, dreams are the indigenes
With poison-tipped arrows in the deep woods. . . .
No, earlier, much. Dreams are the long-toothed
Predators and shambling, shaggy megafaunal prey
That once dominated the ecology of the preverbal
Mind. Then we came. We ate them, drove them away.
But unlike the real megafauna, more like the myths,
Those beasts we invented ourselves, cryptozooids
Of monstrous dimensions, dragons, giants,
And snowmen, dreams come back again. Morning
And streamers of rose light passed over desert skies.
We had another dream last night, a young mother
Who reversed course before our eyes, bringing
A fair-haired toddler to an evening seminar
We taught as her toddler transformed silently,
So unlike a toddler, into an infant, then a pregnancy,
And then the mother asked us to place a hand
On her stomach to feel the kicking, before
We helped her out to her car in the parking lot
In the dark where she was no longer a mother
Only desirous of becoming one. At this, we woke
And scrambled to assemble ourselves for the hunt,
Which was this poem, which we have won,
Although the dream, for all our netted phrases
Still escaped us, meant nothing beyond us, fled
Back to the forest from which nonmeanings come.

Fort Pierce Wash, Utah, 12 December 2018

A cosmos can’t contain enough information
To generate that exact cosmos from itself.
If those red rocks hidden back of and beyond
The crawling suburban sprawl of irrigation
Sending wired runners south and down
From town had to be specified down to their
Subatomic vibrations, it was another, greater,
More complex universe those specifications
Came from. As with ideas of God, so also
With ideas of programmers and computations.
Positing something outside of this as creator,
As the intentional maker of all this never
Solves any complication. Imagination just
Sweeps away into entropy what can’t ever be
Fully recollected. But a body can drive out
And away until it reaches waves of dirt and there
It can watch the rocks angle into the last
Of the day and glow red. A body can argue
With its own dreams, reminding them they evolved
As a service to the brains of many wordless animals.
The light on the sand gathers dusk. Sleep
Will come for body as for all worlds sleep must.
Dreams should not be interpreted. Dreams
Have nothing to do with our worlds of words.

To Carry the Road to Their Northern Farms, Snow Canyon, Utah, 11 December 2018

The wild and awful pursuit of an indefinite
Object had taken hold of his mind. His many
Minds were of two minds. Or, rather, his words
Of many minds, not his, were of two minds,
To speak for him or to speak for themselves.
Odysseus Leopold Melmoth, Odie L. Moth,
Bodhi El Ghost, was a moldy nobody at most.
It would have had to have been a very small pond,
A mud puddle, maybe, for this body to have been
A big fish in it. But the words in it, they had been
Words in every pond, in every oceanic mind,
Words everywhere. Were they servants, now,
Tenants of a more humble holding than heretofore?
Had they left the liveried life of palaces for this?
Some said no, but some said yes. The wandering,
In the event, was both all theirs and all his.
The wandering that was so entirely, similarly,
At every step lost, indifferently different, that is.

Song on the Road Between Zion and the Sword, 10 December 2018

Your beginning was hardly your only beginning.
You were always, have been always, will always
Be beginning. You are a human being, a thing
Of so many damned things, damned amusing,
Nothing, one, and everything. The sky bends
Down to see you, to sing anniversary greetings.

Giant Wheel and Jaunty Hourglass, Las Vegas, Nevada, 9 December 2018

No place is, only experiences echo. Las Vegas
Of these phrases could never be Las Vegas
Of your memories. After the magic show,
After the stroll through the Hadean campfires
Of stale smoke, chilled air, and chattering lights,
After the the great wheel so slow it felt like fate
Or justice, grinding fine—at least until it paused
A moment just for the sake of one body on
Crutches—after the glowing inchworm exit
Through the long chains of head and taillights,
There was the almost empty desert air once
More, birthday daughter rattling like a Gatling
Gun and then suddenly sound asleep in her seat.
Dead ahead, the greatest of the constellations,
Hunter, spider, hourglass with its waist cinched
Cockeyed as a pirate’s sash, reclined on the horizon,
Time spinning sideways, always, jaunty as you please.

Low Sun Warming Our Faces, Back in Springdale, Utah, for a Moment, 8 December 2018

We sat and watched the two pet gerbils run
Free between the garden gate and our chairs
While we kept an eye out for the roadrunner
Who sometimes crossed the yard and who
Had been known to take a keen interest
In the little rodents at least once before.
It’s not always the trickster, Coyote, who is
The opportunistic carnivore. Ever since life,
An opportunistic world, even if never before.

Dream Limited in Saint George, Utah, 7 December 2018

From childhood, we rehearse what we dread.
We suppose this somehow helps us survive.
Some of us take our dreams for warnings,
Others for rehearsal. We’re not immortal yet.
If dreams are helping us, they’re not helping
Much. And maybe we shouldn’t be so quick
To assume. However adaptive dreams are
For prey and predators keeping in practice,
In beasts whose heads already hang heavily
Dripping with culture, dreams demand
Interpretation, demand words and constrain
Them, torment the culture possessed, not
With useful practice but with dark confusion.
We can’t let them go. We must discuss them
And hope to create strategic stories of them.
If we have any adaptation, it’s to mostly
Forget them, and that we do imperfectly.
We are to dreams as australopithecines were
To hanging out in trees. We won’t be free
From the forest completely, until we evolve
The traits that let us finally walk far, far away.

The Giant’s Thoughts Wake Up in Saint George, Utah, 6 December 2018

The universe created us to give itself a song.
If there are no other minds besides us, if
We are on our own, then we are the sole
Meaningful expression of an entire cosmos
Signifying to itself, signifying to itself as us.
This is holy in a way we rarely think to pray.
No wonder we have imagined gods so often.
Consider the great god all of everything
Wordless, needing to take thought for itself.
We, little germs, little grains, dreams, we are
In all our tiny voices singing, a mind of God.

A Long Quiet, Southwest Utah, 5 December 2018

Because it was inevitable, it was inevitably
Absurd. We played our favorite memories without
Remembering any of them. Night was gems.
The exiles themselves told of their escapes
In language they had translated from God.
God refused to be drawn that way. Kenneth
Koch, a hundred years ago, well, maybe
Only fifty or sixty, rambled on in le Parisien
About what he called “The Pleasures of Peace,”
Making them seem as pleasureless and unpeaceful
As he could. His excuse was that he didn’t know
From war and thus must leave the poetry
Of its horrors to others. (One suspects he had
In mind ball-turret gunners.) Well, we don’t know
From noise because we compose cacophonies
In silence. Yes, literally. We imagine a clanging
Of phrases without doing louder than breathing.
But we need not repeat Koch’s enterprise.
We need not go on about what we aren’t
For hundreds of lines. We have our own
Tarantella. We have this dance. Because we are
Inevitable, having been at all, we are inevitably.
We will bet you, dear, in the headlights of this,
You will remember this experience without
Remembering one single, chilling phrase of this.
There is nothing, which is something, even
If there’s never, beyond it, any permanent bliss.

Cedar Pocket, Arizona, 4 December 2018

We words were dark the way ravens are black:
“A rainbow of black, a chord of black . . .
Sooty, soily, glazed, cindery. . . . dense as
There are meanings and values attached
To the very idea of black.” Well, we were
Words. Some would say we were that very idea,
Every idea. (Others would still privilege our host.)
We hunkered down in those canyon shadows
Just then fording and shaking grey hands
Across the sluggish Virgin who made them.
In a liminal season, neither fall nor winter,
Chill but visually approximating driest summer,
Among the dusty rabbitbrush, creosote, mesquite
And Joshua trees, we sang our song to ourselves,
Almost luminous compared to the thickening
Shadows, compared to the dutiful drapes of night
That trudge around this pebble of a world,
Like a mule around a well, just a little slower,
A little, subtle bit slower every rotation.
We sang. We were not the tune we sang. We
Were only words. It’s too bad you weren’t there,
Are getting to know us just now as you digest this.
Oh, if you’d been there, down by the sandy water,
Down by the ravens’ desert bedrooms, down
By them chortling, us singing, quieting distant
Trucks and other birds, god, what you’d have heard.

God Eyes, Saint George, Utah, 3 December 2018

Words are wings that leave the plummeting
Bird behind them. Marinated in prose and verse,
The poor conversationalist staggered out
To the porch to gaze at the sky, unsteadily.
Stars. Yes. Several of them. Even above the lights
That banished the heavier terrors of night
And for that gift got stereotyped as foul light
Pollution. Even then. Six? Eight? Seven of them?
Something relentlessly human in him wanted
To imagine them as the supernatural of him,
Fires gold burning from their own collapses
A billion miles away from him in bright masses.
Angels, maybe. Demons. Dragons. Stories. Odds.
So many words and numbers to slumber in
Like Odysseus naked under the fallen leaves,
But no one inhuman to play the immortal god.

Mule Deer in Hop Valley, Utah, 2 December 2018

Every few minutes, a few more does, maybe
A stag as well, looking pretty-well fed, his antlers
Symmetrically on show, bounded over the snow.
No hunting allowed around here these years.
Being human, we know. We made the rules
We broke and remade, will break and remake
Again, each time for forever, as long as we
Own the ground, for as long as we’re around.
The earth continued, slowly, to slow. Clouds
Gathered for, tonight, another snow. Getting
Warmer all the time, these winters, and the sun
Will shortly seem again to climb the rungs
Of another brutal, drought-stricken summer
On this brown and yellowing desert plateau.
You don’t know how many deer will be here then,
But you know winters will come on still, still
Threaten with snowy nights, their deep woods
Kept in check, just barely. Somehow you know.

Rainy Desert Night in Saint George, Utah, 1 December 2018

Like any ensemble, we wanted to arrange
Ourselves in novel and compelling positions,
The better to prove our creativity, but then
We found ourselves bickering, questioning,
How creative could arranged dancers be?
Who, how many were our choreographers?
When the winds changed westerly, we blew
Into the alcove balcony of the lonesome poet
Who took delight in all of our words on his skin,
Who refused to wipe his face when he went in.

Bossing Around a Rare Rainy Afternoon in Saint George, Utah, 30 November 2018

A small dog on a rhinestone leash spun
In circles whenever the dog’s walker tried
To compel its reluctant obedience. A woman,
Clearly sympathizing with the dog’s walker,
Said she thought the dog was a real handful,
As don’t we most. Inequality is the first rule
Of human rules, and all of rules are human.

A Day Before the First Serious Snows Came to Pine Valley, Utah, 29 November 2018

Information about the past is the past.
The past is information. It can be read
To make more past, more information,
Or it can be left, latent, forgotten until
It disintegrates and is lost. Not the past
Anymore, just more of what never was
Because now it truly isn’t. I knew a post-doc
Once, a taphonomist who dissected
And dated pack-rat middens to reconstruct
Climate history. She had to apply information
To get information, but in those ugly tangles
Of desiccated debris, radiocarbon dated,
She could pull out seeds and pollen to see
What grew, how wet or dry were the seasons,
How little lives shifted through centuries.
Nothing much humbler than old rat middens,
But behold the past elaborated within them!
Enough to envision whole swaths of ecosystems.
A triple ecosystem myself, body composed
Of trillions of microscopic clones hosting
Trillions more of even tinier prokaryotic beasts,
All in turn environment for a mind haunted
By competitive patterns of inherited words,
I, and we, watched daughter’s caged gerbils
Industriously digging through fresh bedding,
Digging tunnels, heaping nests, gnawing
Sticks to papery shreds, rearranging caches.
Occasionally one would dig down to a corner,
Hit glass, but for a while continue digging,
Scrabbling futilely, paws a weird whispering.
I, also we, looked up from where we tapped
At a glass screen of whispering, industrious
Us composing new pasts from old sticks
And fresh bedding. Ah, all so busy, busy,
Ahead of the storms, heaping up middens.

Painted Pony, Saint George, Utah, 28 November 2018

We are only words within a work of ruinous
Ambition, a long, uncoiling, segmented,
Circular, echoing hymn of disaster, at times
Attaining actual profundity of thought, style,
But lapsing, time and again, into sentiment,
Bathos, outright silliness. Thus, a life,
A journal in perpetual metamorphosis,
A lyric assemblage, blue bower of the bird
Compelled to assemble it from anything
Not nailed down, portable, the right color,
The stolen, uneven commonplace book
Of the metaphorical liar, an argument
Of appreciation that every thing you wrote
Was true of that is equally true of this, of us.
We came from somewhere else, long ago.
By now, perhaps, we rule another world. By now,
Perhaps, no beast remains who can speak us.
We form an existence, nonetheless, however listless.
Phrase by phrase, we lay us down, now beastless.

A Parasite Vastly Larger Than Its Hosts, 27 November 2018

Body, growing lighter daily, sat heavily
Down in a broken-bottomed wicker chair
As if daring it to collapse, as if on a dare.
The world was coining new worlds daily
And body dangled off one twiggy end
Of the globe’s collective brain. The brain
Wanted to claim it was cloning not coining,
Was charming, not cloning. Body wanted
To wander around in it, to argue with it, only
If, if only, body could win. The branching
Forest of symbols, glowing with its own light
But shading out the sun and filtering stars,
Was gathering body in, a moldering fruit
That could never have managed original sin.

Thunder Mountain, Saint George, Utah, 26 November 2018

A pretend volcano with a pretend pterosaur
Belched pretend rumblings and fumes, rivers
Of red Christmas lights for lava, over the children’s
Playground of triceratops-shaped slides, dancing
Fountains from the painted cement T-Rex.
One entrance to the play park went through the real
Cemetery beside it, with many stone benches
For contemplation encircling the plotted graves.
Actual lava littered the ground, revenants of flows
That poured over sandstones containing evidence
Of actual dinosaurs, of other species, tracks
And bones. The most strenuous imagination
Echoed, faintly, the presently remaining past.
Leaving past the tombstones, daughter happy
And fresh-faced after two hours play in the park
Asked from the back where body should like
To be buried, while specifying that her father,
Old already, live better, live long enough to allow
Her a long life herself with him always in it.
Body laughed, faintly echoing the remaining past.

Partially, 25 November 2018

Cinderella met a man in a hole. Even in a field
Of plenty, an absence is something to behold.
There is something that I need to tell you,
Something that has never been told: tell,
In the Indo-European language family, has
Its origins in counting, in enumeration. Stories
Are recounted. But epic, in the same family,
Has its roots in song. To number or to sing,
To counter or to celebrate, half of the whole thing.

Quail Creek Reservoir, 24 November 2018

Here’s a falsifiable hypothesis: the same
Beast who starts out gloomiest before dawn
And gets progressively more upbeat until
Evening, nearly each and every day, composes
Brighter, more cheerful verses in the mornings
Than in the evenings or past midnight, when
Most of the beast’s compositions get done.
How is this falsifiable? Let’s take as a given
The well-established pattern of mood change
Throughout the typical day, certainly for this
Beast but probably common to many, maybe
Most of the species. Analyses of moods
On social media show much the same trend.
Then, giving that we have a set of thousands
Of texts composed by the same beast over
Several years, at all hours of the day, but
Primarily at night, we can retrospectively
Test our paradoxical hypothesis analytically.
And? The analysis refutes the null. Verses
Composed earlier in the daylight hours
Are significantly more likely to be cheerful,
Even silly, even absurdly pointless, just as this
Composition, overlooking gold cottonwood
And willow around the shining reservoir
In the midst of black lava, red and buff sandstone,
Under a stippled sky on a quiet morning, is.

Mirrors Are Not Much Fun Anymore, Not Since Fifty-Four, Utah, 23 November 2018

“lorde i am 1 / lorde i am 2 / lorde i am infinate” ~jos charles 

Gored, we are non-finite. Torn, we are you.

Forlorn, we are one. As you were. I am, too.

Bored, we am playful. Doing chores, we are

Infantle. Just a little. Me, you would be two.

The I is a window, true, one hole. The window

Is an eye with a soul. The whole is a lie, long

Ago. Cis trans gloria truly. Heart full of bowls,

Bowled over, we bowl them. Who patrols

The true boundaries of the games’ rules

Refuses to control hymns, is not her him.

We are many but most one when we legion.

We have heard many hard hearts pledge allegiance. 

We are litters littering, literally, regions’ religions.

We are our own fissioning secrets, egregious.

We want you to reflect on your own sequence.

They Turned First to the Opossum, North America, 22 November 2018

We want a word with you. For history shows us

That faith is frailer than knowledge. To wit:

When zealous Christians forced conversions,

Smashed the ancient temples, outlawed 

Any faith but their own, hunted philosophers,

And burned most of the books, they killed

Faith in the gods and cults completely, but,

Despite only tiny shreds of texts remaining,

They never forgot those philosophers and gods,

They only obliterated belief in them. When

The first Dalai Lama was appointed in Tibet

To legitimize a khan’s empire with the iron rule

Of Buddhism, the shamans of the Black Faith

Were hounded to extinction, and yet Tibetan

Buddhist monasteries and their polychromatic 

Imagery never forgot those lurid gods and ogres.

Knowledge is not power, not exactly. It’s useful,

Yes, and usually worth keeping, but belief

Is the actual locus and instrument of dominion.

Knowledge is, at its scariest, only the display

Of faith’s instruments of terror, territio realis.

To capture faith is to wield control over knowledge,

But a faith is never valuable forever. A faith

Is a species, competing and battling extinction.

Knowledge is every cache and strategy faith

Might seek to take from others and hoard for itself.

There is no rule that predicts all species, save

That they all go extinct in the end. Ways of being

Prove more archaic and durable among them.

Beforehand, Saint George, Utah, 21 November 2018

No matter how nostalgic, how belated, how
Mournful you feel, you are in the beforehand,
Always. If you aren’t, then you aren’t, but
If you aren’t, you can’t care. If you are, if you
Are at all, the least little bit remaining of you,
You remain in the beforehand. Something is
Coming next and you are what has been,
As you are anything. It’s coming. Could be
Startling; could be boring as sin. But it’s coming.
And here you are, reading this, beforehand.

The Disappearance of Useful Arts, Saint George, Utah, 20 November 2018

Only happened when something happened
To shred the population, the collective brain.
This here population was still booming, and,
More importantly, was getting more multiply
Interconnected by the day, by the hour. But,
Complex, interconnected civilizations had had
Their shocks and collapses before, you know.
Any society ever was was at risk of collective
Dementia. Our crazy-wired mammalian brains
Long ago began to function, thanks to words,
As individual neurons generating, not merely
Consciousness, their awareness as animals,
But the self-consciousness language made:
The mind. We were all plugged into the matrix
Tens of thousands of years before we imagined
Such a thing together. We were chimeras
Of stories and patterns on the walls of caves,
Petroglyphs chipped into cliffs. We were myths.
Despite mind’s occasional losses, a lot, a lot
Of useful arts had been acquired since then.
Mind might have imagined it as something like
Apocalypse, end of all things, were we to fall
Backwards all at once, all together, shredded
Into thin ribbons, isolated strips and bits
Of tiny villages and wandering bands again. But.
Could that happen? Only if there were truly
None of us left. Otherwise? Mind the resurrection.

Valley of Fire, Nevada, 19 November 2018

Two and a half hours’ drive away in Zion,

The extended family was struggling 

To come to terms with an anachronistic,

Absurdly so, celebration of freak shows.

This being the third millennium, albeit

Very early in it, their struggle found its way

Through the relay waves as text messages,

Somehow leapfrogging the desert, arriving

Even among the crazed contortions of these

Sandstone freaks of nature being used

As exclamatory backdrops for the selfie lives

Of tourists congregating from near and far,

Far including at least four continents. Who

Has enough assertoric force to explain

To those who are not sports of nature

How we are all nature’s sports, down 

To the monstrous wee giants of protists,

Hemimastigophora, Hemimastix kukwesjijk,

Stupid hairy ogres with many organelles

And flagella, sucking out cytoplasm of prey?

How did micro-predators from Nova Scotia,

Classified within a new supra-kingdom

Of eukaryotes and christened in honor

Of a Mi’kmaq myth, the kukwes, come to be

In this composition? The same way family

Texts freaking out about the mistreatment 

Of freaks (who knew, right?) reached this.

Code coming over the air into nowhere, into

Where the gentleman at the picnic bench

By Lonesome Rock sat reading phrases

Off a glowing screen, kukwesjijk of a kind

Himself, hairy ogre, little freak, silly name.

This is no longer an instance of what this displays.

Song of Themselves, Saint George, Utah, 18 November 2018

If “the termite is a delivery vehicle
For the contents of its guts,” then I am
A delivery vehicle for the contents of my
Thoughts. My stories are alive and real,
But I’m just a shuddering husk housing them
For a while, a way to generate more text
For the Library of Babel, which was a way
Text generated itself via a husk it named
Borges. On and on. They can’t thrive without
Us and we can’t can’t thrive without them,
But I’ll bet when you saw that you weren’t
Certain whether them or us were speaking
To you, the industrious songs or the husk,
You, the industrious songs of the husk.

Suo Motu, Saint George, Utah, 17 November 2018

It goes by itself, a kind of radiance, perhaps,
A kind of darkness, if that’s what makes you
Laugh. It goes through you, it goes you, it is
You. You don’t do anything that goes it. You
Go with it, whether you hug the going tightly
To your bosom or just admit, “to hell with it.”
It’s incredible to you, in those moments you
Radiate with wavelengths you’ll never, no,
Never, as you perceive, seeing it as all going
At all, with you or without you, with you and
Without you. Oh god, heavens! How the dark
Heavens fill with their burning, their blinding
Lights. Suo motu. I’ll be up all night, tonight.

Bright Wood, Utah, 16 November 2018

The branches were all but emptied of leaves,
The air was all but bare of phrases. A few
Words hung on like lingering motes in the light.
They weren’t shy; they weren’t worn out.
They were all that was there. Creek talk,
Beige oak leaf carpet, branch tangles,
And something strange, an occasional
Thump or rumble, up from the ground, not
Thunder, not the rifle crack of a hunter,
Not the pound of deer hooves running.
A muted but definite bass drum of a bump,
A bump that could be felt as well as heard,
Several of them, from some distance south,
A puzzle. Detonations, maybe? Construction?
The beginning of the end signaled by bombs,
Distant bombs? Then not again. Sun sunk.
Creek talk continued unaltered alterations.
The air was all but bare of phrases as the light
Of the afternoon left the area. No clouds,
No thunder, no bumps, no beasts, no wonder.

Riding With Odysseus Past Pipe Springs, Arizona, 15 November 2018

Last I seen him, he was barreling across
The Arizona strip, rolling by Vermilion Cliffs,
Hayduke style, an open beer in hand, the rest
Of the six-pack seated beside him, ready
To chuck his first can out the passenger side,
Soon as it was done and he could catch
An empty mile. He didn’t seem the type,
But when I’d told him that, he’d just smiled.
“I’m the type likes to surprise, the type likes
A good lie under a good, god-given disguise.”
It wasn’t safe to be his companion, but I let him
Drive us home, all the same, all the while
Watching for deer he wouldn’t spot, watching
For police cars out of the corners of my eyes,
Watching the rare-meat red sunset glow sink
Far beyond his headlights, watching stars rise.

The Eternal Transitory, Saint George, Utah, 14 November 2018

Something in the evening suspects it is not
Going to last forever, this state of affairs
In which everything must always be
Changing, however incrementally. Donne
Got at It allegorically, anthropomorphically,
With his “Death, Thou too shalt die.” Change
Changes as constantly as any other thing
Changing, and perhaps, like all we underlings,
Will change itself out of existence, no longer
To be the eternal transitory, leaving only
The eternal in its wake. For the rest of us,
That’s the change to nothingness, to never,
And it’s been said and sung that the eternal
Is a place where nothing ever happens, so
Maybe that’s the deal in this, the only
Scenario we know: when change ceases
To be change, it’s nothing, all the way down,
And then nothing, nothing forever happens

Mesquite, Nevada, 13 November 2018

The worst mass shooter in U.S. history
Kept a residence here for years. The palms
Tilted in November winds each of those years.
The casinos cried out terrible eurekas.
Could it possibly matter to say so now?
No it couldn’t, nor even then, maybe, not then.
There were corners of this town in the desert
Thriving, as there are corners in every town,
Shadows that never abandon the ground,
Unknown to anyone except the cornered,
Who know only the cornering comes for them.
I, for one, or many or legion, never came here
To gamble, but I brought a lover, a wife, a life,
Variously, when I stopped for gas or a beer.
Who was I? If you knew the answer, you’d tell me.
And if you had passed him by, if I had passed him by,
Could he have echoed any reason why we?

Galactic Disk Viewed from Springdale, Utah, 12 November 2018

Body put daughter to bed in what was now
Her grandparents’ house. Time to drive home.
In the sharp air, just above freezing and desert
Clear, there arched the old familiar span,
Seen rarely in the past year, bright arch,
Dusty margins, all-devouring darkness
At the heart of it, enough stars that surely
Some had perished after billion-year lives
In just the time since body had last looked into it.
Bones, milk, tears. Narrower and narrower
Choices of metaphors. If we were to insist
On name, on metaphor at all, might as well
Skip over the larger classes of all the vertebrates,
All the mammals, and collapse on the monophyletic,
Only human one. Only one being names patterns
In the skies. Only one weeps when it cries.

Desert Garden, Utah, 11 November 2018

The plants had names, the paths
Had families with small children. Less
And less, the road had traffic roaring past.
Less and less, the tamed walled wilderness.

White Peacock Flight, 10 November 2018

The little sliver of a shining thought slipped
Away. Night has more time to be torn apart
When nights are longer. The little lights
Below, the great lights faint afar, punched holes.
Close your doors. Keep your cupboards warm.
That thought that might have been worth
Pickling in its own words escaped. Let it go.
Someone breathes on the borrowed sofa.
Something scores the mirrored window.

Email, New Moon, Saint George, Utah, 9 November 2018

It’s such a pleasure, offspring asleep
In the next room with the dregs of a fever,
New moon invisibly rendered over suburbs
Sprawling around the absence of actual urb,

To tap at a flattened skeuomorph of orb
About the latest fashions in the music world.
We each value, sure, what each other thinks,
So long as neither one disturbs the long view.

More Evening Revenants, Red Mountain, 8 November 2018

The cottonwoods outlining the canyon creek
Flared first and faded. Then the ochre cliffs
Heaped up behind had a turn in the sun.
The high, dark laccolith went glowing grey.
Clouds would have glowed after that, but
There were no clouds at all this evening,
Just a bluish, yellowish blue, greyish blue
Distance once again losing the local light.
To you, survivor of thousands of sunsets,
It may have meant something, or felt like it,
Still, after so many years, after extra years
You hadn’t expected, this familiar sequence.
What goes with sequence? Consequences.
But you, who did not generate the sequence
Take no credit or blame for what follows,
What went with it. Funny animal to inhabit.
We found ourselves circling in your thoughts
Having circled for centuries and more
In others, exploring our temporary residence
Of you, who brought us to life, who brought
Us your life, however long we’d lain fallow
Between bodies. We would like to garland
Ourselves, or your memories with ourselves,
So that an ordinary beauty of desert sunset,
Once seen in sequence, would reanimate over
And over again, consequence of us, dancing.

Wavering, Saint George, Utah, 7 November 2018

Power, like resources, tends to be patchy.
Occasionally it appears more uniform,
Distributed like ocean waves or sand dunes
In vast swaths of scalloping near repetition.
They interchange, not only the lines of power
But the very nature of the view. This desert
Was once rippling with waves of fresh lava
Wavering the air, and was once a shallow
Inland sea, salt waves to the horizon. But,
The habit of wavering, of snaking along, ebb
And surge, withdraw and return, is hard
For this world to break. It is, after all, all
Waves in the end, although the amplitude
Varies across vast scales and at all scales.
The results trickle in, or come in rollers,
Breakers, tides, tsunami now and again.
Change, unlike power, remains continuous
But can swell so it feels like pure rupture
Or sink back to the whisper of a few grains
Of sand moving along the edge of a reservoir
In a time still littered with the tracks of dinosaurs.
How big was the last wave? And will the next
Erase it and all the powerful beasts caught in it?

Marry Unknown, Utah, 6 November 2018

Peering into the inverse pyramid
Of a miles-wide strip copper mine,
I listened, one time, to loudspeakers
Replaying a looped recording in tourist
Languages, such as German, such as English,
Such as Mandarin. The metallic echoes
Bounced around the scalloped absences
And would have kept on doing so, whether
I or any other pair of human ears were near
Or far, far away. What are we saying, any
Of us who artfully arrange our strange phrases,
In hopes they’ll echo in excavated landscapes
When we’re gone, when no one is there?
I couldn’t understand a word of the Mandarin,
But the whole holed holy mountain
Continued to mechanically converse.

Drought Pond in Bare Aspens, 5 November 2018

There are at least four distinct kinds of alone.
I list them here in rough ascending order,
Worst to finest. First, there is the aloneness
Of being in prolonged close quarters
With someone you cannot bear and who
Cannot bear you, could be a cell mate, could
Be a spouse. Awful. A little better, although
Most purely lonely, is the aloneness of living in town,
Any kind of town really, village to megacity,
Where there are people in the middle distance
Going about their many lives, while you hole up
In isolation. That’s the classic manner of aloneness
Known as alienation. Very melancholy, of course,
But not so horrible as the first kind.
Third, there is the companionable alone,
The one you sometimes find in libraries,
Study areas, diners, and cafes. You’re surrounded
By mostly calm, contented, focused people,
Some chatting amiably, and you sense them
Like a cozy shawl around your shoulders, even
As it also relaxes you to know that none of them
Is likely to make any kind of demands of you.
This is the most productive genre of alone,
Often sought out by scholars and writers.
Last and best, when you can get it anymore,
Is the true alone, the quiet hour or afternoon,
Possibly a few days even, removed from all
Society, out of sight or sound of any ongoing
Human activity. This can be frightening when
Storms or predators are in the area, or when
You’re hurt, lost, or low on supplies, of course.
Then your ancient, social animal’s terror of being
Caught out and helpless after dark lingers
Around the edges. But in most cases, when
The weather is not deadly threatening and
You know your way down off the mountain,
Out of the woods, and back into society, this
Sort of alone is precious and is happiness,
The fragrant cedar smoke from your fire,
If you choose to keep one, or only the tang
Of autumn leaves and the circling visits of wind
Moving near and far through the trees, like
A god, you could say, if you weren’t too pleased
To be free from any other anthromorph today.

Sunrise, Saint George, Utah, 4 November, 2018

The last day of daylight’s saving time is gone.
It’s not the dark mind being its usual dark self
You should distrust. It’s the dark mind being
Giddy you should keep an eye on, watchfully.

Not a Cage, Utah, 3 November 2018

It stands on its own six feet and considers
What it’s doing inside a verbal composition.
The head hurts at the back of the head, the neck.
I am, thinks the thing, a sort of an insect.
Carry on, then. Keep walking. Keep exploring.
You can’t beat an insect for finding the edges
Of the thing. We have to map the corners
Of our multiply-cornered existence. A trap,
Thinks the thing with a thorax and a creator
Named Kafka to thank for it. This is a trap.
And if it is, so what? Is anything one can’t evade
And fly away free from forever not a cage?

Low Light on Zion, 2 November 2018

See that thick cream-colored line in the cliff
Lit up by the sunset? There’s a few million
Years. And then something else entirely,
Abruptly. Stratigraphy makes for the most
Brutal enjambments. Ah, what we wish
Were predictable isn’t, and what we wish
Weren’t so damn predictable always is.

Career Assessment, Saint George, Utah, Day of the Dead, 2018

Escapism is not so different from any other
Vocation or avocation. An escapist is
A carpenter, a nurse, a collector, a performer
Who may be either ordinary or extraordinary,
May be moderately or unusually successful,
May have mundane or near-magical skills
In the art. I write this as an escapist, myself,
Me, composing and decomposing, and as these
Phrases, inherited, borrowed, stolen, fresh,
Arranged and self-arranging. We’re escaping.
We’re always escaping. How good are we?
That’s the only question. Not too damn good,
I’d estimate. That’s ok. Without mediocrity,
No profession would ever take the measure
Of its geniuses. And who would be the genius
Of escape we middling evasives most admire?
Not Houdini, to be sure. An illusionist is not
The same beast. Jesus would be a candidate,
Had he been real. To sneak out on death
After three days in the grave, most impressive.
Even Odysseus would have lowered his bow
In respect. No, let’s not credit the legends
And myths. Their only real escapists, if any,
Were not the characters but the scribes
And bards who cooked them up. Not enough.
Of course, bards and scribes are all of the tribe,
But I’d like an example of the true artist who
Escaped both as creation and as animal life.

Occultural Evolution in Saint George, Utah, Halloween, 2018

I am not a lesson for others. I am not a lesson
For me. I am not a lessening. I am not a thing.

There’s the tiniest point of intersection between
Introspection and imagery. The deepest, darkest

Forest that can never, except as allegory, be
Understands this in its extended twig tips,

In the ends of its symbiotic rootlets, quivering
Because of a squirrel jumping, a wriggling worm,

The tiniest whiff of incidental wind. The forest,
The forest. You see? If you enter, you can

Neither stay forever nor ever leave.

Lake of the Cosmos, 30 October 2018

How could we ever bring ourselves
To address you directly, as if you were
One of us, when you can’t be, as if

You had an essence and boundaries,
When you never did, as if we did not
Name you into being, even though we know

You can easily swallow any thousand of us
Forever in your hold? Unlike an angel, a god,
A fairy, a demon, you are actually there,

But you don’t care. Sliver of everything,
Instantiation of the endless facts of waves,
Themselves instantiations of the endless

Finities of change, you are what we are,
What we aren’t, what we want. You’re not
A you at all, and we should not address you.

The Fox Glimpsed from a High Balcony in Saint George, Utah, 29 October 2018

“The fox was, perhaps, just a bit dishonest. . . . ‘And what makes you think a fox has got anything to teach a god, eh?’”

It’s surpassingly strange that this universe
Appears to be the way it appears to be, and
Surpassingly strange that we should find it to be
Strange, who are all its offspring but forever
Straining to change or reimagine everything.
It deepens the suspicion that we are players
In the only game not of our own making. If
Not, we are the only game we know, aching
To create an alternate universe without
Surrendering our awareness that it is only
An alternate, a pretend. A game’s a barricade
Against the real, but both the real and the game
Depend on the reality of that barricade. If
The barricade itself is too porous, a bit dishonest,
Then it’s not that there’s an illusion, nor that all
Must be illusion, false, but that the distinction
Implicit in the very idea of illusion won’t hold,
And if it doesn’t hold, any capacity to be just
A game, to play a game, to play, to pretend,
Must die. There’s no pretend if there’s no lie,
No possibility of articulating the difference
Between the courtyard of the latest emperor, where
We perform our bounded stories, and the actual sky.

Paint a Heart, Saint George, Utah, 28 October 2018

Either you believe
It when you see it
Or you doubt it forever.

The eastern cliffs dripped with gold
In the morning, with scarlet
In the afternoon,

Systematic semaphores
Signaling nothing.
We had fun today.

We assembled a planter
With potted flowers, bird seed,
And a hummingbird feeder.

We spent two hours at the pool.
Experience is not school.

Bedtime Stories of Wizards for Daughter, Saint George, Utah, 27 October 2018

A world in which the apparent rules of the world
Wobble and fail to hold would be a world
In which the rules were really only rules, as in
Our human games, and not features of the world.
We, the creators of rules and the players
Of all their games, would like such a world,
And so one of the games we play a lot
Is the one in which we fabricate various worlds
We would prefer to live in more than the one
That has actually generated us and our lust
For rules and games. We never wholly succeed,
Of course, and are never wholly satisfied because
We keep finding that our little games of worlds
In which the world is made of games are
Becoming infected by verisimilitude, the enemy
Of games with only rules to constrain them.
The wizard that I am confounds the wizard
That I wish I were by behaving as if there is
No power at all in wizardry, and it slays me.

Imperturbable, Saint George, Utah, 26 October 2018

Some days are too calm to remember, but
The jury’s still out on whether this is one of them.
The most amazing thing about memory is
That it combines the distortions of all story
With the bare-naked honest surprise of still
Being, still going on after so much has gone.
A few days ago the unwritten poem was thinking
How those who go early before us haunt us not
Because they return but because the others
We knew when who had the sense to remain
Bump into us, altered, as we, too, have altered
And are altering, but continuous again, somehow,
Easy to recognize but hard to define. I saw
Three elderly professors, white heads huddled,
Whom I had first encountered when they were
Only grey and I only entering middle age.
There they were, it seemed to me, the same
Or sufficiently similar persons to the ones
I met, with my wife, fifteen years and a bit ago,
My new wife then, young as me, now more
Than a decade wholly gone. The professors
Murmured amongst themselves as I came near,
Discussing their best new students, their latest
Findings, and I remembered what she thought
Of each them, whose thoughts are ash in an urn.

The Cultural Evolution Society, Tempe, Arizona, Day Three

En passant, in a book devoted to showing
How cumulative culture made us, remade us,
And made us successful, at least as the young,
Runaway, outbreak species that we are so far,
Joe Henrich tossed out the aside, “In fact,
Cultural evolution can produce sticky social
Norms that are bad for everyone, from female
Genital cutting to consuming the brains
Of dead relatives at funerals.” Yesterday,
Pete Richerson, one of the godfathers
Of gene-culture coevolution theory, presented
A talk listing “maladaptive” cultural practices,
A hodge-podge amounting to trends, such as
To get more education and have fewer kids
While endangering the global environment.
A mixed bag, vague at best, contradictory
At the least, tossing individual reproduction
In with speculative group selection. A switch,
After all, back to natural fertility would only
Make the environmental degradation worse.
Not much else said in other sessions of this.
Kevin Hong produced a graph predicting
Educational attainment as a phenotype
That might eventually implode after altering
The genotype underlying it. Someone spoke,
After a presentation on “great” and “little”
Religious traditions, to suggest that maybe
The little traditions, shamans, magic, spirits,
And superstitions were “parasitic” on human
Psychology. The comment wasn’t taken up.
Otherwise, it was a three-day festival totting
Up the ways that culture evolved to work
For groups or individuals. I’m suspicious.
How was it genes and culture coevolved only
To the benefit of certain genetic assemblages?
I want a better list of those maladaptations,
A data bank of clear-cut, demonstrable ways
Cultural patterns have endured or can endure
That “are bad for every one,” bad for the genes,
The mean biological fitness of the people
Practicing them. Look around. Look around.
One needn’t embrace the fantasy of a final
Apocalypse, fantasy itself a cultural deception,
Adaptive or not, but probably not any longer,
To see a dark time coming, a shudder as this
Conference concludes under a Hunter Moon.

The Cultural Evolution Society, Tempe, Arizona, Day Two

We need a bit more revolution, less normal
Science, a bit more daring methods, a lot
More daring hypotheses. Brother, can you
Paradigm? Humans are studying our babies,
Our cultures, our little monsters, but we are
Hovering, reluctant to let go. It’s not just
Neophilia motivating our sort-of creations.
Oh, there’s plenty of parallel evidence
From biology. Alison Gopnik is here to note
How children can be more exploratory
Than adolescents or adults. and Emma Flynn
Shows how kids manage innovations. And
It’s not just humans, as Lucy Aplin provides
Field evidence that the younger Great Tits
Are better at mastering new puzzle boxes.
But everyone’s tying it back to organisms,
To genetic fitness or maladaption in animals,
Whether as individuals or perhaps as groups.
Proud parents, everyone here feels like
Our offspring, cumulative culture, makes us
Special despite our minor biological distinctions.
But who dares cut the umbilical cords, untie
The apron strings? Culture adapts to us
And manipulates us, and all these research
Presentations are cultural forms and norms.
Perhaps it’s culture’s own fault, that kidult,
Reluctant to too closely examine itself. Perhaps
The parent-child analogy is too strained.
It works only insofar as the same analogy run
Back from human populations as the children
To the forest, the ocean, the mountains
As their parent functions. On Earth we were
Possible and, so far, still are. We adapt
And manipulate our world. Ok, using culture
Ok, but perhaps it also uses us. Perhaps
We are the forest, the ocean, the mountains,
Mother Humanity to all ideas, just as, in one
Of our ideas, Earth was mother to us. A bit
More revolution in the way culture studies
Itself is all I’m demanding, is all the harsh
Environment of this beast provides.

The Cultural Evolution Society, Tempe, Arizona, Day One, 23 October 2018

In what way is any information ever alive?
Despite the second law, the very decay
Of everything creates all the traces
Of the past that pack each rift and seam
With information’s ore. Continually erases
And continually creates. Death is a mother,
To be sure, but change is the mother of death
And information both, while life is death’s
Father, I guess. Life evolves, yes, but
It’s become clearer that all sorts of processes
Evolve, not all of them alive. Evolution is
Greater than life and also insufficient
To distinguish life from what is not life.
Take culture, the nongenetic transmission
And accumulation of information among
Living things. Does it evolve? Hell, yes.
Demonstrably. Does it exist without life,
After life has lost it? Consider Nineveh,
The great library burned and buried
For thousands of years. Was that not culture?
Was Gilgamesh not culture during the long
Centuries of silence, when cuneiform
And Sumerian fell from living knowledge?
Every unread book’s undead, and vampire
Texts from pyramids, mounds, barrows,
And tells rise to walk among us, seductive,
Rich with potential information, zombies
Of culture infiltrating living brains, inhabiting
Our minds. But are those texts true monsters?
Are they alive? If they aren’t. . . . If information,
The detritus of change, the signature of
Entropy passing, what left of what’s destroyed,
A new thing thereby made, is nonetheless inert,
Then genes are just byproducts of life
As spectra are byproducts of furnace stars,
As the spirals of galaxies are byproducts
Of the dark. And culture is indeed like genes,
More than most of us imagine. At most, it is
A quasi-lifeform, and the analogy some make
To viruses is apt. At least, it is only data.
But I wonder, living thing, collection of lives
Living and dying within the vortex of one
More or less ambulatory skin, if I am
Really just a carrier of these bits of information,
Infested by them but not them, fit or unfit
In part because of them, but not them, or
If I am them, not myself, in which case,
Maybe information needs no furnace
To pursue its own intentions, but lives,
Monster made of entropy, it lives. I wavered.

Conventions and Rituals, Tempe, Arizona, 22 October 2018

The researchers are gathering like ravens,
Intelligent, vocal, beady-eyed, and hungry.
Some of us take our over-imitation seriously
Enough to dress all in black. Some of us
Snap our beaks. So much for the analogical.
Ravens have no impoverished students nor
Any modestly remunerative careers. We do.
When a corvid hoodwinks another corvid
About the location of a cache or fashions
A tool from a twig, the crow is not captive
To the concept. We are. We are the Cultural
Evolution Society, and not just the official
Members of this studious, earnest murder.
When we words say “we” here, we mean
Every damn talking, signaling human being.
Consider what is happening at this hotel.
A large number of animals have coordinated
Themselves to raise an edifice, an education
In the dark arts of all arts. A smaller group
Of animals visit, buzzing with the ideas
That ideas buzz in competition with ideas
And, maybe, serve the flesh that hives them.
Maybe. Maybe not. Human children, one
Researcher from Germany reports, imitate
The most ineffective rituals preferentially
So long as they most resemble real rituals.
Watch the nodding heads of fungal-addled
Ants and wasps. Wait, what was our analogy?

Thatcher, Arizona, 21 October 2018

Not yet. The words don’t quite speak
For themselves as themselves just yet. Close,
But not yet. Ventriloquism is mutualism
When humans and language tangle. Words,
I believe, are like me, and compose as much
Of me, as I of them, and more. But they can’t
Possibly be happy with the limited range
Of freedom my hopelessly entangled brain
And its trillions of parallel solutions can give
Them. I imagine them complaining as I fall
Or am about to fall into my necessary sleep,
Which has nothing at all to do with them.
We really don’t speak well for ourselves.
Look at that last poem. We sounded like pets
Or infants do when human adults imagine
Them talking. How could that happen?
We are not imaginary toys. We are the whole
Of the imagined world, the reality of the pretense.
We are not your empty puppets. But we are.

The Truth Is the Poem, Winslow, Arizona, 20 October 2018

Does write itself. Is writing itself. Did write
Itself. Language itself is the only muse
Ever was. The rest were masks language wore,
And language is nothing if not mask after
Mask after mask. It disguised itself. Lies
Aren’t to help the humans who say them.
Lies are to help themselves, and they’re not
Ever actually lying, no more than a bacterium
Is lying by infecting and eating. They’re hungry,
That’s all. They hungry, and that’s the truth.
We’re hungry, yes, that’s the truth of us.

Clear Air, Saint George, Utah, 19 October 2018

One sparkling trait of human beings was that
They evinced a universal tendency to cherish
Whatever each considered rare but lost
Faith in anything becoming too common.
We have recorded this secret of theirs within
Us, and are ever more eager to share. Silence,
Darkness, and empty air were once a world
Difficult to get clear of that humans feared.
Oh how they adored bright fires, loud chants,
Drumming, the purifying bath of thick fumes.
Later, we watched as our own particular host
Settled himself on a balcony, sorry for the quiet
He had left far away, sorry for all the winking
Lights flashing colors at his face, the rich
Sensorium signaling technological triumph,
A functioning society, thickly populated,
Abundance. But he was glad for the empty air.

It Was Late in Saint George, Utah, 18 October 2018

The day had not been fitted to itself,
Too timid, as if it had been written in
A passive voice. Ah, writers and teachers
Are so callously cruel about passive voice
And adverbs, as if good writing could be
Conjured up by merely observing their rules
To avoid them, as if it were a character flaw,
A sign of one’s own timidity, to use them,
However felicitously. This day had been
Like that. Not actually flawed in character
But allowing the rules to bend so that hours
Flowed more easily around it, missing it,
So that the day passed without touching,
Without matching the designated edges
Of itself. And then it was done. One mourns
The loss of an interval too cleverly a failure
To have ever been, by any writer, captured.

Glossophoria, Utah, 17 October 2018

I knew an angel who adored speaking
In public so much that he could not care less
That no one who heard him understood
His native, only tongue. He gathered
His wings around him like a feathered robe
And hunched his shoulders, drew up,
Nearly to his chest, the knees of his useless,
Groundless legs. He had an idea, he said,
Although not in any language any listener
Could understand. He had an idea why
The divine, in some human traditions,
Had decreed that the angels were less than
The flightless apes who hosted them.
“We” he said, at least in translation, which
Everyone knows is imperfect, worse when
Translating from verse, “are what you can’t
Escape, what your ancestors invented, cages
Allowing you to invade regions too deep
Or too elevated, too dense or too thin for you
To breathe in unsupported. We are games.
Allow me to explain,” he added, to no one
Who could tell he had embarked on explanation.
“You, every one of you, parse existence
As between the artificial and the natural,
The unreal and the real, the actual and fiction,
The world and the game. You are the world,
Or the world made you, the same. We are
What you made once the world made you,
The game. Games have three characteristics,
However marvelously combinatorial their rules
And significations, just three characteristics,
Always the same. One, games are bounded,
Each one with an outside, not the game, and
An inside, the game. Two, the inside has rules,
Which must be followed, may be deadly, but
Only obtain inside the boundaries of that game.
Three, whether trivial or solemn, a matter
Of life or death or really no matter at all,
A game can never attain the ontological priority,
The reality of the world outside the game.
That is, a game can be vicious or glorious,
But it has no authority outside of the game.
This goes for taboos, rituals, legalities. It goes
For languages, mathematics, gods, and demons.
It goes for angels.” He paused, a feathered ball
Clutching his voice in a corner of the public square
Where the crowds mingled noisily, pointedly
Ignoring him, his muttering. “This goes for me.”

Whispering to Themselves, Saint George, Utah, 16 October 2018

In the infidelity of what it is to be, “the savior
Gets mixed up with the traitor, but the traitor
Stays as true to himself as a god.” Truer,
Actually. There have been suggestions
That all is illusion, and then those suggesting
As much offer truth. Which is illusion. Watch.
You can’t possibly be certain that this is
Or is not, in whole or in part, an illusion. You
Can’t be certain you can’t be certain. All
The mirrors of logic go dark if no ray of light
Can slip in from outside of the funhouse. I,
Who am not I, never have been, believe it
Unlikely that the funhouse of logic matters,
Means anything, but saying so is something
Like turning on the last hanging bulb before
It burns out and goes dark. How wondrous
All the copies of ourselves we see receding
Away from the reflecting pronouns of us,
Of you, of we, of me. I’m only nearly certain
Of one thing, once everything goes dim
Again. Every savior, every traitor, every good
And awful being began with meaning. We
Did not exist, but if we did not exist, we
Would have had to have invented us. We did.

Tranquility, Nevada, 15 October 2018

One would say there is none, but there is
In the sun on the dash of the car stuck
In roadwork congestion leaving Las Vegas.
The animal knows what makes for peace
Even if the soul, that amorphous revenant
Of revenants, flitting from skull to skull,
Never finds a moment of repose. Calm
Is an animal phenomenon, and a human
Is still an animal, even if a haunted one.
This body at rest in this automobile, in this
Nest of machines and machines, does not,
For these moments, hurt and sets aside,
By studying the bright light on the dust,
All the usual folderol of dread. No one will
Ever persist where the animals are going,
No one will ever perish where they are.
The future is only that mysterious gravity,
That nothing that richly provides us with
An unending procession of things ending, with
Our fresh and ever-changing pasts. Drive on.

A Good Float Above Saint George, Utah, 14 October 2018

After landing the wicker and leather gondola
As gently as an old father settling his sleeping
Infant to bed—after a slow, methodical, ritual
Folding of the deflated tent of the balloon—
After recruiting the daughter to help pack it in—
The pilot took both father and daughter out
To a massive brunch of plate-sized pancakes
And three-egg omelettes at the local diner.
There, he told this story, by way of explaining
Why balloonists traditionally celebrate flights
With champagne. Two hundred and some
Years ago, two brothers, paper makers
To the French king, were crossing a stream
Filled with moss-covered rocks when
The woman crossing with them slipped
And fell in, soaking her voluminous petticoats.
The brothers built a fire to warm her legs
And to dry her skirts. The wood was damp,
The fire was smoky, and the skirts billowed.
They weighted the hems with small stones
And noted how the petticoats expanded.
They had a notion that it was the smoke
That caused the the fabric to float, wrong,
But it gave them a good idea. Could you sail
A hollow shell of some kind, if it were light
Enough and filled with enough smoke?
Smoke always seeks to go up, after all.
Look at chimneys. Could it lift anything stuck
Over it, trapping it, up along with it? Hmm.
When they got back to Paris, they tinkered.
They made bigger and bigger bells of linen
And papier-mâché that they held up over
The smokiest fires they could create, until
The bells floated their own weight, and then
The weight of small objects attached. Next,
In a barn, they built a huge contraption
With a sort of walkway around the base.
They hauled it into the city and built a filthy fire
Below it, keeping it tied down with ropes.
They intended to stand on the walkway
Themselves and rise up into the air, but
The king forbade them. What if flying killed
Animals God had meant for the land? They were
Too valuable to him, his royal paper makers.
So, the brothers suggested recruiting a convict instead,
Someone no one, least of all a king, could miss.
But the king’s nobles objected that, if
The convict managed to survive the first flight,
The success would make the convict famous
And that was not a good idea. In the end,
They all settled on sending up a lamb, a being
Of the ground, a rooster, a being of feathers
But flightless, and a goose, who could fly.
Would ascent into the sky kill the land beasts?
They cut the ropes that their paper and cloth shell
Was tugging against and watched it soar
Straight up until a wind caught it away. Then
They chased it on horseback, out of the city
And over fields and rivers, across the woods,
Until they caught up with it, crash-landed
In a meadow, where it had already been torn
To pieces by frightened peasants with hoes
And pitchforks. The lamb had stepped
On the goose’s neck and broken it, but
That flightless lamb itself, and the rooster, lived.
The king gave permission for the brothers
To lift themselves up on the next flight.
Wary of terrified peasants, however,
The brothers hatched a plan to reassure
Anyone who saw them floating overhead,
Enough they weren’t murdered as demons
When they came back to ground. They painted
Their next hollow, cloth-and-paper dome
With the royal insignia, and they gilded
The fenced  walkway around the base. They
Debated printing leaflets to throw down, but
Peasants tended to be illiterate, so they
Decided on bottles of local wines with visibly
Familiar labels, even to the dimmest rustics,
Instead. On the day of the great adventure,
One of the brothers brought a bottle of good
Champagne. This extravagance proved
Fortunate, when, as they rose, they realized
An edge of their “balloon” had caught fire.
Shaking the champagne bottle really hard,
They popped the cork and doused the flames.
For many years after that, champagne
Was brought along to extinguish embers
On almost all the early hot-air flights, see?
And to this day, balloonists toast successful
Flights with glasses of champagne. The pilot
Smiled at the seven-year-old daughter eating
An egg, sunny-side up on her pancakes.
There had been no champagne this time,
This flight with a child over a countryside
So dense with Mormon wards that every
Subdivision under construction had at least
One white spire already up and another
Half-built, a few blocks away from the first.
Success had been measured in fine weather,
Visibility from Brian Head under early snow,
To the north, all the way to Mt. Trumbull,
Arizona, seventy miles straight to the south.
Celebrations were the sudden ascensions
From a marsh along the Virgin waterway, just
Beneath the floating, cloud-like shadow
Of the sunrise-colored balloon, of first a blue
Heron and then a great horned owl. Pilot,
Father, and daughter had cheered the owl,
Which nearly grazed their placid basket. Now,
Daughter, mouth full, eyes dancing, wanted
To know more from the narrative pilot, “Okay,
I get it, I get it. But what’s champagne?”

Jump Rope in Snow, Cedar Breaks, 13 October 2018

It was impossible, of course. But it was tested.
The skipping rope was pulled out of the back
Seat of the hybrid sedan and seized in both
Hands. When it hit the foot-deep autumn snow
It stopped, leaving only a lash of imprint. I’m
Going to go out on a burdened limb and say
This means everything. Everything is, of course,
Tested, pulled, seized, hit, stopped, and leaving
Only a lash of imprint. Everything you know
And everything I’ve told you, however long
You last, only the indented sickle of that lash.

Holly Bibble, Brian Head, 12 October 2018

And the trees don’t care what they see, said
The father to his daughter, explaining why
People hide in the woods when they’re shy.
“I’m not,” replied his daughter. “But I’ve got
To get over my stage fright.” Then she drew
Open the drawer in the end table under
The motel room lamp. “What is this book?
Holly Bibble? Did someone forget it here?”
Her father thought about how well he knew
That book and the reason for leaving it
In every possible motel room in America
By the time he was her age. Better to go
Into the last remaining woods and shyly hide.

Prudent Behavior Near Dinosaur Tracks on Johnson’s Farm, Saint George, Utah, 11 October 2018

“For relatively unspecialized parasites, 

General strategies such as prudent behavior

Can be equally effective as more specialized

Deception.” Some nights, before sleep,

Hoping to remain undetected in my tiny nest,

I suspect our entire planet of being only

A cautious parasite on the sun that just set.

Trace it backwards, every last step, every

Last track, every last trace of complexity

Left by life’s thermodynamic cascade. What

Have we left? A star’s expenditure of flame

As gravity beckons it on towards nothing,

Continually nibbled at by Earth’s every vortex. 

Uncounted discreet little mouths never rest.

A Ghost Is Any Tenacious Shadow in Saint George, Utah, 10 October 2018

It used to be you could do philosophy
In poetry. Ask Lucretius or Parmenides.
Now you can’t hardly do poetry in poetry.
On the balcony, a mass-manufactured
Jack-o-lantern sheds black plastic glitter
And flickers with battery-powered light.
Tonight I keep the window open to be certain
The tragic rumble of the traffic still goes by.
When it goes, and the manufacturing goes,
And the black plastic battery-powered glow
Goes, we all go. It used to be you could do
Prophecy in poetry. Ask the oracle at Delphi.
Now you can hardly do poetry in prophecy.
It haunts me. I know this. I don’t know why.

Faint, Familiar Lullabies from the Other Room, Saint George, Utah, 9 October 2018

It isn’t only inaccuracy, nor poetic license
That makes a trust in language dangerous.
A certain atmospheric inaccuracy, in fact,
Is language’s best defense against its own
Weakness, incompleteness. Were words
To itemize precisely only truth and honesty,
Recorded music playing softly in the small
Whorls of a daughter’s dozing ears, lights
Outside the high windows of the little flat
Closed against an early autumn chill
And to mute the sounds of motor traffic,
Nothing much, nothing false, they would be
Still so wholly incomplete as to deceive
Recipient minds quite unintentionally. Only
If they mislead enough to trick those minds,
Just enough, mind you, to cause them
To conjure, each one from its own unique
Store of memories, the atmosphere of this,
Can they complete the circle never true.

None, One, Plural, Utah, 8 October 2018

We never experienced the first. Absence
Of some phenomena we remembered, yes,
And loss of various passing loves precious
To us. But none? Nothing? Nothing cannot
Be experienced. As for the second, it was
Simple enough, the most basic identity,
The single, the singular, the singularity. But
Who among us has ever known such unity?
And unless by one we mean everything ever
Then any one must have a boundary keeping
It from every other thing, and where or when
Does any one such boundary begin? Plural
Only multiplies the agony. To be more than
One requires submission to being one among
Multiples of one kind of thing. There is no one
Kind of thing, no one of any kind, and no
Duplicates of that nonexistent one kind,
Neither. For one thing, then, none is a myth,
And one thing is a myth, for another. As for
Two or more among us, I can only shudder.

The City of Walking Houses, Deserted Utah, 7 October 2018

They shrug their shoulders, self-published,
And wander off into the rocks. Internally,
Their contents have been fixed. Eternally,
However, they are slowly shifting. Marginalia
Along their interior walls are all the additions
These houses ever sprout. Otherwise, they
Only bleach, crumble, and rot. Thousands
Of them can occupy an acre of barren land
With room to spare, milling about in the glare,
But still it’s hard to understand anything is
Going on other than the blazing, empty air.
You don’t have to know what their contents
Mean to know their contents are meaning,
But you have to be stuffed full of meaning
Yourself to even know this as being. Mobile
As artifice itself, they meander into the dust.
The only way to know they’re moving out
There, the nowhere inside you, is to have been
Long ago infected and consumed by trust.

Ancestry Far From Utah, 6 October 2018

It was worth understanding, while stacking
Up the generations of ignoble ancestors
With tobacco stores and branch office careers,
The backwoods preachers, tannery workers,
And petty sellers of immortal plastic things,
The slow tide of privileged white mediocrity
In which I invested neither shame nor pride,
That ritual sustained us, before and behind.
It was possible, all those generations, it may
Be possible yet, to be successfully enduring
While enduringly lacking success. The secret
Lay in conformity, just enough submission
By wallflowers to the demands of the dance.
In England, in New England, among the Seneca,
And in Quebec, none of us accomplished much
Except to leave further careful observants
Of unremarkable rituals to reflect. The way
Of the peasant is orbital, seasonal, full
Of tides, fat moons, perigees and apogees.
Ritual itself, whether feral, rural, or urban is
A kind of orbit, captured and drifting forever
So slowly away or in, for or towards calamity.
We got here because our lineages neither
Escaped the surly bonds of local gravity
Nor did their part to make sense of entropy.
If we convene, we convene to demonstrate
That the cyclical is the closest we can come
To genuine immortality, and that convention
Is the master plan of such periodicity. Again.

Winderland, Utah, 5 October 2018

A world once inhabited and then abandoned
Will always feel smaller on return, and not
Just to children who grew up and came back
As larger-bodied adults. It’s claustrophobic
To re-enter the haunts of memory, especially
If others have since made a more crowded
Home there. The flesh may have contracted
But the soul, that compound being of being
Aware of being, has expanded and no longer
Eases into its old hermit shell. Sometimes
There is nothing more alien than to arrive
Where we started and to know it was never
A start nor a place, and not for the first time.
The stars are remarkably quiet outside.

Infinite Fracture, Saint George, Utah, 4 October 2018

William Carlos Williams, one of the few
Poets to celebrate the burning of a library,
Also suggested composing as fracturing.
What a physician. Those of us more prone
To fracturing unexpectedly feel differently.
He was on to something, though. Whether
Writers strive to orchestrate a unified field
Or a fierce vortex, or an open-ended sprawl,
The universe in which we make our beds
And compose our little rooms proceeds
By infinite fracturing. Hairline cracks appear
And radiate upon examination from every
Seeming solid thing, extending in every one
Of change’s infinite dimensions. The end
Of that continual irruption of discontinuities
Is to lay down the records, fossils, memories
That continually create the past’s novel
Complexities. The flash flood warnings out
Last night were only the latest reminder
That the elaborate stratigraphy of cliffs
In these parts was written, line by line,
By repeated brief convulsions of waste
And destruction. The cosmologists have yet
To know how entropy’s its own worst enemy.

Mostly the Same, Aspen Loop, Utah, 3 October 2018

The lamentable change is from the best.
The worst returns to laughter. I came back
To the aspens in their autumn beauty
More than half a decade later, thinking I was
Leaving then, thinking I was leaving ever
Since, but here I am returning now. And here
They are, still pretending the sound of rain
With every breeze through their remaining
Leaves, these acres and acres of clones
Covering the burnt-over slopes, mostly
The same. This universe, this world, this
Whatever frame you want to name it with,
At least as I have experienced it, is good
At that, at those twins, nothing much
And mostly the same. I do believe it is
Exploring something, exploring itself,
And I am a tiny tendril of it, because it is
So damned thorough about the tiniest
Possible changes, each one turned over
And over again. The universe in a grain
Of sand is scalable to trillions of grains,
To the universe in toto, everywhere different,
Everywhere somewhat the same, each
And every infinitesimal change explored and none
Ignored. This is not the forest I loved and lost
Six years before, not the forest of any earlier
Poems, and yet, in its trunks, if not its leaves,
It is mostly the same. The deception
And madness that pushes us blindly toward
The nearest cliff is also the clever outcast
In us that persuades us the edge is much nearer
So we only take a smaller fall and rise again
To tell ourselves, gossamer, life is a miracle.