The Song of the Bobbing Coracle, 31 January 2018

We don’t return where we began. We don’t
Return where we left off. We don’t return.
We go. Gravity is beckoning. Gravity is not
A force, a geometry, a thing. Gravity is
The nature of nothing. It draws us. It draws
Us on. We go where gravity is beckoning.
That’s exactly the reason the damned
Monster can’t be found in the equations.
How do we unify nothing with our theories
Of everything? For more than a century
We’ve been picturing curves of distortion,
Dense in-gatherings, good for predictions.
But now that we can at last detect, as if
With giant stone and steel underground
Spectacles, the waves that shudder in us,
Rippling time, we still can’t seem to fit them in.
Nothing’s not for fitting. Gravity's where
We ended, where we begin. Gravity always wins.

Kemb, 30 January 2018

At the next crooked bend in the turning,
Where the current exchanged slower
For faster water, and then faster for slower,
I wondered what I would barter for more
Leisurely drifting on the river. What if
Every origin myth from before Adam until
After the Big Bang had run it all backward?
It was not everything exploding from nothing
(And how could it? Why would it?)
But everything first, everything still, static,
And therefore not a nothing at all, only
What I might call nothing much. Imagine
An hourglass jammed, sand in a sphere.
It’s all there, all going nowhere, the original
Heaven of nothing ever happening, happening
Forever. A hole in the bottom, the doorway
Of time, the insertion of gravity draining
Everything toward empty, so it all spills away.
Now imagine a vast collection of such spheres
A sphere of packed spheres all draining inward
To the inifinitesimal, infinite nonconformity
At the center of all spheres, the black hole
As god, each sphere draining at a different rate.
The confluence of all the intersecting sands
Become gems, beams, atoms, particles of light,
The world as we know it, heading steadily
But unfathomably variously toward
The vanishing, away from static plenitude
Through the elaborate relationships
Created by zero tugging out the different
Rates of change. Do you know, now, what
Gravity is? Gravity is nothing itself, drawing
Us out and down and on from nothing much.
I watched the fine silt swirling in the vortices
Around my little floating coracle of skull.

Watching the Virgin River Fall, 29 January 2018

If change itself is infinitely divisible
With some remainder of every division
Of difference remaining apparently unchanged,
Then the only purity of either sameness
Or change is the final erasure into nothing,
But what is ever purely erased? Matter
Converts into energy, energy into matter,
Only pattern, a particular sort of sorted
Information, a soul if you’re such or dream
Of being one, can vanish absolutely
Into nothing, if that. If that can vanish,
Then I’d say that it was vanishing that
Has created everything, drawing everything
Out and onward, all infinitely tiny, cumulative
Differences in the rates of change, this river
Of Heraclitus drawn down always and only
Because of gravity, the final eater, the falls.

Dawn, 28 January 2018

As it’s all infinitely divisible, infinitely
Compounded, days are years, years
Are days, and that is the problem. Echoing
Telescopes pointing in every direction
Distort our perspectives of time,
Which is, itself, only echoing distortion.
In the event, the twenty-eighth day
Brightens into grey. The fifty-sixth year
Is the first for many and the hundredth
For a very few and anyway, what echoes
In the minds of those who must experience
Is rarely orderly memory but the sum
Of some recent concatenation of repeated
Behaviors, the pictures on a screen, stories
In a book, politics in a paper, gossip in a pub,
The endless family arguments on the same
Topics until one or the other leaves or dies.
All in the head in the grey morning trying
To sleep a little more on a dim grey bed,
Brain counting itself in and out of dreams
Of telescopes pointing every which way
To the done and the lost and the never will.
Then daughter comes in and jumps
On the bed and the better part of life returns.

The Red King Sits, 27 January 2018

I have never jogged in place. I have
Never run a race. I have only watched
The scenery rushing towards and by me.
If I could remain completely motionless
Within, I would be content to wait
For the destruction from without. I am
A passing adjustment of several slower
And faster rates, but my intentions, resulting
From this discombobulation of existence
In one dimension, barely rates a mention.
I am sedentary, but I am anything but still.
The world the Red Queen runs to match
Unfolds and decomposes in me as it will.
I saw black ships invading, a massive navy,
But I ran my marathon at my windowsill.

The Butterfly Defect, 26 January 2018

The temporary decal tattoo from the visit
To the butterfly house is down to fragments
Fading on the wrist. Daughter had one, too,
Washed off completely within a week or two.
For decades now there’s been a fondness,
Extending out from the mathematicians,
Theorists, forecasters, and general scientists
To the further tendrils of populous culture,
For the idea of chaos, hurricanes, tsunamis
Begun in a difference of butterfly wings.
Not only is it not the case, however,
That every single scintillant flicker portends
Unfathomable weather, it is sometimes
The reverse, as when the hugest changes,
Those catastrophes themselves, lead not
To vaster differences but to roughly
Equivalent situations downstream, thanks
To the erasures created by those very wings.
This appliqué tattoo reminds me as it fades
From the shedding scales of my mute skin
That despite profoundest fealty there pulses
A lack of proportion in the heart of things.

Ghost Mountains, Central Utah, 25 January 2018

They receded in a snow-misted series,
The usually sere peaks seen from the road,
The stance of the seven, veiled. What to do
With this experience of a world for which
I have been tuned, my ancestors turned
On the spinning axis of its lathe, this world
Which selected for minds like mine that
See an almost unbearable beauty in scenes
That for the world itself are ordinary, routine,
The mountains crushed up by shifting crust,
The clouds condensing as all clouds must.
I’d say it was an irrelevant coincidence,
Except it’s almost ego, I suspect. This scrim,
These veils of virga snows, all within this
Something spun the one thing guaranteed
From birth to worship it. Our filial devotion,
Our pleasure in this planet that shapes
And masters, then reabsorbs us each to find
Whatever better, more devoted shapes
It has in mind, isn’t this the reason for all
Parenting, this the mother of all parents?
I haunted the mountains that haunted me,
Haunted the shapes that shaped me
Because I was made to praise what made me
Even if it had no idea what praise might be
Until it carved from itself these singing species.
Night fell as I rolled on and ghosts receded.

Writing in Place, 24 January 2018

It’s the infinite range of the differential rates
Of change that creates and has created
The space for place and the sense of place.
Eternity is nothing, never was, never will be,
But if you want to name a god to claim
Responsibility, name your god after pace
Because it’s pace, approaching asymptotes
Of infinity at either end, fast and slow,
That permits contrast and similarity. That’s how
I’m phrasing this endlessly ending strangeness
For today, a day I spent inside the changed space
Of a single house with doors and windows shut
Against winter, peacefully pacing and pacing
Inside these flickering changes, inside brain,
This captive bear created by this barred cage.

Passport Office, Salt Lake County Clerk, 23 January 2018

Here were all allies. We were all allies here.
The clerks were unfailingly helpful. Photos
Were taken. “Did you break the camera?”
Joked the friends. Confusing heaps of forms
Were explained. “That’s the 2013 version.
Let’s transfer your information.” Patient
Individuals of various shades of skin waited
Each a turn. Some things could be paid
In cash or credit, others only in money
Orders or with personal checks. The woman
Who filed my renewal asked if I’d done
Good traveling on the last one. I thought
Of the previous ten years of my existence,
Happiest and most self-destructive, and said
Yes. And what was my favorite country
Visited? I recommended Namibia, and she,
With a conspiratorial chuckle reminisced
About the time the President of this nation
State referred orotundly to the mythical
African country of “Nambia.” I smiled.
At the booth beside me someone mused
Whether any of our passports would arrive
Before the next federal budget shutdown.
There’s a truth among commoners seeking
Permission to travel the Earth. Any of us,
Clerks or customers, could be struck down
And denied, by mistake or by fiat, anytime.
Civilization is a protection racket, at best,
For the mass of we trivial lives, for the most.
Outside the unwashed window sun glowed
Ignoring the imaginary world its heat raised.
Here were all allies. We were all allies here.

Small Orbit, 22 January 2018

I’m turning in circles. I’m missing something.
I’m staring at a five-petalled flower,
The wooden blades of a motionless
Overhead ceiling fan. Is there a way
To similarity that doesn’t involve anything
Staying perfectly the same? Some rates
Of change are too slow for our perception,
Given. Some changes are too microscopic
To be detected except by extraordinary
Effort, and others, zero-point radiation
For instance, are largely theoretical
And can’t be directly monitored yet at all.
Is it possible to say all similarity is the fault
Of faulty perception, not illusory, exactly,
But a kind of incomplete information?
Consider this flower. Set the engine spinning
Lazily, and some of the change becomes
Apparent. Set it spinning fast enough,
The petals vanish into a blur. We don’t call
The blur a stable thing. Fast-enough
Cameras could take pictures that recapture
The appearance of the fan blades still.
Time lapse long enough or fan speed
High enough and even the blur vanishes,
Although the blades would still break
An errant hand thrust into that vanishing.
Similarity, including similarity to the point
We perceive as eternal stillness, unchanging,
Would then require nothing stay the same,
Only such dramatically different rates
Of change, in the ever-changing observer
As well, that the contrast simply escapes
Our ability to perceive any difference
But difference it still is, always, and stillness
Only the greatest difference of all, change
Outside our range, one direction or other,
The essence of change, change within
Change, contrast too great to measure whole.
All this time, the whirling flower fools us still.

Bright Window, 21 January 2018

To return to the problem at hand. What
Is there between two similar scenes, say,
The bright white and blue light of this winter
Window this afternoon, the pale grey light
Through what would seem to have been
The same window during the previous day
Of steady snow? We have established,
To our own satisfaction at least, something
Must have been exactly the same within
The continuous change seeping in
The very atoms of the sill and pane.
Any similarity requires some aspect remain
Unchanged. Now, what could that be?
Not simply any bit of matter, all having changed,
And not only the relationship still holding
Between arrangements of matter changed.
What, then? It’s not enough, even, to blame
The ever error-prone brain. Looking through
This window at a black night now that gives
Back my own familiarly similar reflection,
I may fairly say I’m missing most of the fact
And nearly all of the change. But still,
There could be no illusion of stability
Were it not that some aspects of this window
Stayed the same. I’m tempted to capitulate,
To say that what stays is an essence,
An immaterial, unenergetic something, but
That just kicks the can without solving
A thing. Persistence through change,
The persistence of change, of incomplete
But continuous, of vacillating but nonstop
Change. It can’t be change itself that’s still.
This window is the eye of the soul. No
Enumeration of its stable traits makes
A name for its stable whole. But it’s whole.

Snowy Salon, Salt Lake City, 20 January 2018

Here is a penny bent, and here is a penny

Scratched. Here is a penny melted. Zoom

Down to atoms and each one has changed,

But some of the pattern, even in the puddled

Coin, remains the same. Is that it, then?

Is it pattern, relationship that isn’t always

Change? The ship of Theseus, Locke’s sock,

Grandfather’s axe, Kossuth’s pocket knife—

There never was a paradox, never needed

A formal cause, because the only thing

That was ever moment to moment the same,

The only aspect that made for similarity 

Never inhered in any material part, not even

In the merest wave, but dreamed within

The relationships that could be dasselbe.

But no, watching the snow, I know 

That’s not enough. A relationship between

Changed items may be similar but not

Exactly the same. And nothing can ever be

Similar, if nothing is ever exactly the same.

The snow lies white on the open ground

And clings to every twig, which is the same

As saying it lies and clings within my brain.

Between Rooms, 19 January 2018

Now it gnawed at me like a hungry ghost,
The question of similarity, of partial change,
Of incomplete transformation. Body moved
Between rooms that were never the same
But recognizably incompletely changed.
An old, easy assumption no longer obtained.
It was never the case that some part altered
While the rest remained, never exactly,
Because the minutest examination found
In every finest sliver of revenant a change,
Down to the subatomic particles and waves,
Cut along the asymptotic approach to zero
Elapsed time. Imagine the spacetime curve
A rippling silk scarf, floating through the air
At the summons of an illusionist begging
You to cut that scarf somewhere, anywhere,
With the shiniest pair of fabric shears.
Every time you cut it neatly, wherever you cut,
A bright line appeared and the scarf fell
In halves, only to reappear as a whole.
Attacked in a frenzy of scissors, a blizzard
Of rainbowed silk confetti, each and every
Cut at every conceivable angle gleamed
With the same transient line, but all one,
Not even a remaining seam. Time after time
Was all those divisions, one after another,
And the seamless scarf that floated
In the seeming space created already again.
Something remained unchanged despite
The all-pervasive change. What I couldn’t say.

Red Butte Gardens, 18 January 2018

It’s the scenes that change the slightest
Most bewitch us. A few atoms, sure,
Of the bench body occupied this afternoon
Had fled, the wood likely stained, sanded,
And stained again more than once since
Last time this bundle of blood, bones,
And earth-moving memories sat there,
But it might as well be called the same,
So self-similar as to serve as its own
Temporal doppelgänger, bench and body
Both, the twin apartment towers the same
From which body once walked once weekly
To this same exact spot, the city the same,
At least from up here, the paths unchanged,
Years of diligent maintenance keeping
The corruptions of sun and season at bay.
It was hallucinatory to return after years
Away. It’s always hallucinatory to return,
And that’s because it’s just that: hallucination.
So ran the usual sermon in the woolly head,
And it was right, as far as it went, but
It didn’t went far enough. That change
Continues constantly in everything, no
Matter how sliced thin, is so true it should be
A truism, but what is similarity, then,
What things within the same old scene remained
To make it so nearly the same? From change
To change, not everything has changed, or
If everything has changed, then some things
Have changed less, and what is it then of them
That has not changed? We seek out stillness,
But stillness there is none. Neither is there
Any absolute transformation. Dice the scene
However slightly, every slice will show a change
And yet somehow something of each slice
And of the whole remains the same, or there
Would be no similarity. What is that sameness
That carries changes with it everywhere,
In every microscopic pore, without being
Totally changed? Body mused and wondered
As the floating moan of a freight train rose
Over the steady, distant hum of roads
And the querulous signaling of songbirds hidden
In the drab leaves and straw of a mild winter.
The last time here, body recalled, it was
Spring and snowing. It was years ago and this
Body had just been widowed. So that was
Something different, but something bewitched
Whatever inhered in the remains. A voice
From the path asked a silent companion,
“Has your mother ever lied to you in anything
She meant? Then why start thinking she would?”
Indeed. Why start thinking? What has changed?

In Passing, 17 January 2018

No matter where I seem to go, my home
Remains in passing. Je ne peins pas Tetre,
Je peins le passage. True, I mostly prefer
My body calm and comfortable, ensconced
In some machine hurtling over highways,
Rails, waves, or jet streams, but I swim
Sometimes and often sit quietly in a house,
Still in passing. And when I lie on the ground
In a sleep sack, dreaming, or under a hard rain
With fresh broken bones, screaming, I am
At home in passing. This afternoon in a shop
Eating a bowl of noodles and soup alone
While traffic rushed by and I tried recalling
My adoptive brother, dead fifteen years now,
I remained with him in passing. This morning
On the phone to my past, discussing futures,
My voice crossed the air and was recreated
At home, hundreds of miles from me, in passing.
The secret of all nostalgia is that we don’t
Really want to get back home again: we want
To leave home forever yet manage to remain
Ourselves while we refrain from passing.

Holed up in Good Weather, 16 January 2018

Winter sometimes, it seemed, was a need
Of the mind as much as a product
Of thermometers. On a perfectly suitable day
For early spring, the mild air stirring,
The sunshine pouring in, body was having
None of it, determined to stay at a table
Beside a south window, the ideal position
In which to work bundled while it snowed.
A bear might die without a hibernation;
A mind might go awry without a few dreams.
I hunkered down with my texts and writing,
A fisherman with nets needing mending
Whether or not winter weather rolled in.
And what did I mutter around the hot stove
Only in my head? Only that another
Few decades of technology uninterrupted
Would see the final erosion of the reasons
To be fine-tuned to Earth’s periodicity.
The pressure of selection now favors those
Who can do with little mending and less sleep.

Pulling into Nephi on Fumes at 6:45 PM, 15 January 2018

Up and down the desert like a yo yo,
South and north and north and south
Since he began commuting between
Moab and Orem nearly a decade ago,
Now parenting between Salt Lake and Zion,
Always alert for deer and speed traps,
Our road-hard highway Charon goes.
Once he’d thought he was an Odysseus
Of sorts, a capable, pliable, valuable liar
Who had an authentic heart and hearth
Waiting in that bedroom arbor back home.
But he realized at last he he’d never been
Going home, that his home was only his
Back-and-forth. He’d never actually been
To war. He’d never outwitted the monster.
He’d ferried the dead souls of memories,
Clutching their obols, and this one living
Daughter, his own Susan Sto Helit of sorts,
Back and forth, back and forth. The orbit,
The vortex, the thing like a wheel that spins
And collects our souls, the pendulum,
The All-Day Eddy, the day, the year,
The commute, the cyclicity that makes us
Possible within thermodynamic decay,
This was his metier. Others might spin
In tight circles like gears, never jumping
A sideways move out of their well-greased
Grooves. Others might loop the globe
Like lassos slip-knotted to make a noose,
Designed to drag down the strangled world.
Others might escape forever into chaos,
Falcons who’ve slipped the falconer,
But he was none of those, our commuter,
Our wandering planet, our hairy comet,
Our icy dwarf. He pulled into a gas station
And refueled as he watched the blurred stars
Halo his reeling skull. Another farewell
To daughter done, another Orphic cargo
Delivered, time to return to shore. Which shore
Hardly mattered anymore. Back and forth.

Sugar House Park, Salt Lake City, 14 January 2018

Pried loose from bright screens, the cousins
Romped in the sun, climbing and daring
Each other to do physically reckless things.
It was deep winter, or should have been,
But there wasn’t a fleck of old snow left.
Even the usual inversion had cleared.
It might as well have been spring, inversion
Of another sort. Didn’t matter to the cousins
Chasing each other over the bare lawns
As they’d chased each other with snowballs
Back in fall when it was colder. Three elders
On a park bench to soak up the sun
Were murmuring, however, worrying
What this meant for future weather, and I
Considered the usual moral here, the one
About living like children, in the present,
And not ruining life in pointless rumination.
But I wasn’t buying. I’d listened to the kids
Fret over their immediate futures, when
Would food arrive, the weekend end,
Parents come to take them home again?
They weren’t freer. Their horizons,
Like their frames, were only smaller. Enjoy
The present fully and you’ll pay a price
Tomorrow. Obsess over tomorrow,
And you’ll pay a price today. It seems
Telling that those with longer, moth-eaten
Scarves of memories and shorter prospects
Range their concerns over absurdly vast
Time spans, while those whose recollections
Fall off a cliff before two years ago, who live
With the distinct possibility of seven or eight
Decades still to go, fret over a future of days,
Months at most, most days. It seems telling,
But it isn’t. What’s telling is that when
This day became tonight, nothing changed
About how continually things keep changing.
And what’s it telling? We can’t change
Ourselves by moralizing; we can’t change
Our moralizing by willing ourselves. We
Change as we change, and like the days,
The sunny and the seasonal, we end and
We end, but there’s no end to our endings.

Thaw Declares Yourself, 13 January 2018

The rusty mariachi toppled over and on top
Of the melting pile of former snowman.
These things happen. Imagine it was a piece
Of random metal falling over in melting snow.
There. That would be inhuman. But it wasn’t.
In our world it was a confection of meanings
Intersecting with the actual, a kitschy statue,
A lawn ornament of a mustachioed hombre
Playing an iron guitar, that fell into the slush
That had been a man with a cloth flat cap
And a carrot of a nose. And so forth.
One mariachi, one snowman are two men.
This is old song. Doesn’t matter which
Language, which tradition, which faith
Defines you. You see a figure of a man
Made out of scrap, you’re bound to think
Of something. Man. Musician. Metal tools.
You’re symbolic. You can’t help it. You see
A watch on a heath, you think a person
Dropped it. You might even think a person
Made it, when you’d know, if you thought
About it, that no one being invented or forged
Such a complicated thing. No one being
Made the mariachi. And the daughter
Who made the snow man worked within
A design tradition predating and informing her.
Are you reading this? Then this, poor thing,
Even this, is more you than you ever were.

Aquarium, 12 January 2018

We went on a Friday field trip. Daughter was
Determined to visit every exhibit
At least once, and her old father
In his rented wheelchair was inordinately
Proud of her. A tactile kid, she visited
The two “petting” pools twice, but also
The anaconda and the giant pacific octopus,
Exceptionally good at camouflage.
Everything else on the tour map, every tank,
Every simulated ecosystem, every habitat,
She hit once, from the Amazon’s electric eel
To the penguins of Antarctica, from sloths
And cloud leopards (in an aquarium!)
To the Blue Tangs, White Sturgeons,
River otters and Japanese Spider Crabs.
This being Utah, squads of double strollers
And pods of small children thronged along,
Their fingertips, lips, and noses crawling
As Lowell’s had before them, snails on the glass.
Glass. Plexiglass. Miraculous substances
That could bring a thousand species
Eye to eye, the aware and unaware alike,
With the one monster species whose skulls
Grew the glass, the machinery, the trucks,
The traps, the research, the storylines
About lost clownfish and cute otters,
The whole shebang that raised this edifice
On the high, far inland continental desert
Under the mountains of snow and copper.
How had life’s ruthlessness come to this?
“What are we doing here?” Old father
Muttered to delighted daughter. “It’s fun
And educational” explained the gently
Condescending daughter, “and there’s ice
Cream in the cafeteria.” So there was.

Reading in the Parlor, 11 January 2018

“Never trust anything that can think for itself
If you can’t see where it keeps its brain,” said
A wizard in a popular fantasy I was reading
To my daughter, in a warning to his daughter.
Fathers were forever warning daughters
In the stories I’d imbibed since I was the age
My daughter was today, and earlier as well.
I never wanted to warn my daughter, when
For every useful warning a girl took to heart,
Three were ignored, two counterproductive.
But I could see a glimmer of something,
A much, much larger monster than magic
Diaries that converse with their authors,
And not even only AI or the fabled singularity
That the humans who labored toward such
Things feared in their soothing beds at night.
Where did literature keep its brain, centuries
And thousands of years gone by? Where
Did religion, engineering, traditional art
Hide their secretive, capable brains?
Cultural information began distributing
Both the processing and the information
Among individually captivated, competitively
Cooperative boneware long, long before
This remarkable machinery whose brain
Cannot be seen cranked out the chance
For me to join the rest of the neurons.
I would have warned against the sources
Of warnings and warned against warnings
Everywhere, were I to warn against anything.

Flickering, 10 January 2018

Mere existence was never without mystery.
Whoever ever said that it was unmagical
Had grabbed the right end of the wrong
Complaint: mere existence could often be,
Often was, unsatisfying and always prone
To obsessive riffing through the tiniest shifts
In emphasis, the infinite variants of grains
Of sand, the ramifying diversity of snowflakes,
The waves each slightly differing while all so
Similar, yes. But not the same, no, however
Frustrating, and not unmagical, however
Unmagical. It was damned mysterious, destiny
Wearing its invisibility cloak of randomness,
That mereness of existence, the weirdness
Never quite caught in the weir of awareness,
Always managing to slip in, silvery, and through
Thought’s net. When the bare floor shone
With the glitter of a near disaster, when
The breaker flipped and the kitchen flickered,
When ordinary catastrophe was averted
Narrowly, or was never, there was at the core
Of the danger a mystery and at the core
Of that mystery a danger. I never once took
The subtle serpent of experience lightly.
Fate’s tapestries were all woven with a fang,
And the green thread through the shadows
At the center of the dull scenes shimmered.

Lessons, 9 January 2018

All day outside the window it threatened weather.

We rehearsed our brains like animal trainers

Trying to get stubborn zebras to waltz,

Old body and young daughter, repeating

The slogans and algorithms necessary

To pass for other than ignorant in our day,

Which has had its own, unique requirements 

Compared to any other human society

Of any other era, although not one population 

Ever went without training in some fashion.

No one human ever escaped the trickery

Required of humans in their given era. Clever

Species to have discovered a way to create

A prison of conspecifics, an ecosystem 

Of the others, huis clos. Oh well, we’ll do,

As we did this afternoon, as best we can.

Body fretted over the essence of multiples

Demonstrated through games with jellybeans

On a bare, polished dining table. Daughter sensed

That this was both enchainment and essential,

Although she managed to master the zero,

Which was something amazing, considering

Nothing was nothing for most generations

Ever rehearsed hard to win at imagination.

She may yet win, thought body, dreaming again.

Retail Outlet, Salt Lake City, 8 January 2018

The frizzy white Afro of a thin man in black
Motorcycle leathers—and with an extraordinarily
Long and scraggly white beard past his ribs—
Bobbed gently in the breeze from an overhead
Heating vent at the crowded cellphone store.
Just to see him swaying there patiently,
Waiting for a customer service representative
To help him solve his connection problems,
A giant, mutant dandelion wispy and ready
To be blown to seedlings and wafted away,
Caused a thousand adjectives and not a few
Adverbs to bloom in this observing brain,
This equally frizzy, freighted, and swaying brain.
Whatever will become of us humans,
Creatures ornamenting our shells
With creations no one of us created,
Recreating us? Already our ornaments
Are almost all that’s left of us, have been
Almost all we’ve left of us for millennia,
And soon enough, like this, will become us.

Vacant Virgin Bookstore, Utah, 7 January 2018

Waiting for daughter to materialize
Out of the thin, dry, warm-for-winter air
In front of what used to be a used bookstore,
A little brick building in the desert,
Body listened to static and words floating
In from that very same air. A myth of a girl
Who was the best and brightest of her class,
Poor but preternaturally gifted, the future,
Who screamed in horror when she saw
The better education that had been denied her,
Was being promulgated over the radio.
The reporter who sought her out could not
Find her. There was some manipulation
Of the supposed-to-be true story to create
Suspense, but then the radio crackled,
The voices evaporated back into thin air
And an only semi-mythological daughter
Rolled up, riding in the back of an old truck.
The sun shone, the mythical truth forgotten.
The shelves remained empty and dusty
In the shadows of the Virgin Bookstore.
The only cure for story is never to finish one.

Snow Falling on Parked Cars, 6 January 2018

What could I write that wasn’t this?
What could I have written, guaranteed
To save my life? We sat around the table
After breakfast, debating the ecosystems
Of publishing in this blinkered world.
There had to be a small adjustment to truth
Just slight enough to make it rain.
By the time I actually began to write
For resources floating out there somewhere,
That morning rain had changed to snow
And the better composition ruled outside
The window. A lesson fell. Those flakes,
Whether or not they really were each unique
And we could tell, wrote a message on cars
And walls: nearly innumerable minor changes
Are the minuscule creators of real worlds.
Anything repetitive without a difference,
Anything, is a myth and a simulation.
But I kept writing anyway, kept faking
The winning background pattern, one eye
On the slowly filtering, world-transforming snow.

Tea Grotto, Salt Lake City, 5 January 2018

The server was clearly incapable
Of handling a minor rush. Poor thing.
Can you reserve some compassion
For the ordinary, for the ordinary
Miseries and failings of this ordinary
World? I have never been near a death
Camp, nor a refugee camp, nor a war zone,
Nor a quarantine, nor a natural disaster.
I don’t trust my instinctive compassion
For them. What do I know of such suffering?
I have been in hospital beds; I have fallen
To the ground broken and screaming.
Those I do know. But what I notice is that
Even in the absence of any pain or horror
A dull day can be hard, hard to handle well,
And compassion for the merely flummoxed,
The insufficiently competent, the harried
Can be hard to come by. I tried. I leaned
On my crutches, sagging as I waited,
And thought, she’s beyond her capacity,
But she’s trying. The ordinary city traffic
Rolled by dully, inconsiderately, outside.
I was beyond my capacity, but I tried.

Taking in the Evening, 1400 E, Salt Lake City, 4 January 2018

I didn’t do it properly. I only stole
A few moments at the window
With the lights still off inside
And watched an egg-and-pearl-light
Afternoon slipping behind the houses
Across the street. A man walked
A pair of large black dogs on leashes
Down the shadowed sidewalk. Nothing
Else moved visibly to my eyes. There,
There was the moment you could almost
Want to last forever, knowing it was boring,
Knowing you could never bear it, but
Wishing that you could because it was
So quiet and uncluttered, the afternoon
Dimming, the great black dogs trotting
Peacefully on their tethers, the inside
Of the house dimming as well but warm,
Warm enough, the bare trees barely
Stirring at even the tiniest tip of twig.

Cross Town, 3 January 2018

While it was perfectly true no errand
Could be run to turn back time, to the extent
That time could be sensed at all it had to be
Drawn as an inference from an incomplete
Difference, and the incompleteness
Of each difference created what we sensed
As time and space, the latter a secondary
Shadow of the former. So when, for instance,
A shambles of an often-broken man
Shambled into the county services building
On an errand to begin a passport renewal,
The incomplete difference of that experience
From an earlier experience of entering
Officially the same offices to procure a copy
Of documents necessary to a divorce
More than a decade earlier, itself incompletely
Different from an experience of entering
Those offices to obtain a marriage license
For that eventual divorce a half-decade
Before that, conjured up a sense in the brain
That time had been turned back, that it had,
In fact, doubled over on itself repeatedly within,
Thus creating, a place for documents, of unions,
Separations, and renewals, which really was
Every place there ever was, although not all
The others were official or in offices.
There was no time at all, you see, except
That turning back time made it appear
So that we could say with that shambling man
Yes, I remember this place—it was long ago
But it was here, and I was here, and now
I’m changed but it’s still here. Not this year.

Truck Accident, Cove Fort, Utah, 2 January 2018

It might as well have been a bomb
From the looks of the remains.
All that was left of the cabin
Was the back wall and black stains.

Any ambulances were gone
By the time we passed the scene,
Although they hadn't left quickly
And the sirens hadn’t screamed.

That half-hour long crawl of traffic,
That moment to rubberneck
And shake our heads, felt bizarrely
Familiar in retrospect,

A queue to the mausoleum
Or to a glimpse of the bier
Where the great leader lay in state
For witnessing, except here

What caused us to pay our respects
Wasn’t the life that was lost,
The great life lived at great cost,
But the black flower itself, the wreck.

Things To Do, New Year’s Day 2018

The places our ancestors placed beginnings

Felt ridiculous in the dark of last night. Why

Couldn’t their calendars have started in spring 

And their days begun closer to dawn? At dawn,

Bleary-eyed and weary but not in the least

Hungover from a sober night watch, body

Was thumped awake from dreams of insolvency 

Too like life when daughter jumped onto the bed.

Any way you sliced it, by then a New Year 

Had unquestionably begun to begin. Begging

For screen time gave way to more rambunctious 

Play, a sunny day spent around the house

Barefoot, discussing eventualities such

As ear piercings and school terms, painting

Glued scrap wood pieces to make a canyon river

Scene, platform for the real project of arcing

A spindly web of bridge from 3D ink over it.

There was wrestling on Grandma’s couch,

A spilled drink on a rug, an hour’s pretend play 

With imaginary monsters who spoke their own

Language of sibilant grunts and taught classes

In which the older monsters drilled the younger

In how to pronounce polite phrases in English,

Monsters being always shadow humans

Reflected back into the waters of our culture

The way secondary shadows waver under

Real water, being themselves water, visible

To anyone leaning over the gunwale 

Of yet another tiny, passing boat. Then,

After dinner, the three generations collected

On cushions to rewatch the Song of the Sea,

And a holiday season vanished peacefully.