Backyard Rabbits and Surgeons, 31 March 2018

Right on cue for Easter weekend, a bunny,
Wild silver, hopped into view, intangible ash
In the brilliant-green postage stamp of yard.
Daughter wanted to love it to death, pet it,
Tame it, make it her own. She built it a hutch
Of cardboard and cellophane that she hid
In the brush beside the bicycle shed
Under which the rabbit had made a home.
She filled the hutch with soft grass
And rabbit delights, carrots and cabbages,
Then made a trail of snacks to its entrance.
Then for an hour she pretended to be
A bunny learning highly improbable tricks
Such as somersaults, cartwheels, marching,
And catching a ball, her the father the trainer
Doing whatever he was told. When the real
Bunny remained under the shed, daughter
Switched to a new game, making father
Lie in the grass, the victim of a bad fall,
A dozen broken bones, while she did surgery
With items from Grandma’s sewing table,
A spoon, a cookie sheet, and bandages
From Easter ribbons and toilet paper rolls.
The patient made as full a recovery as pretend
Allowed, then struggled up, swaddled
As a disheveled mummy, and lumbered
Back into the house. Late at night, the date
On the calendar gone, nearly full moon high,
A siren skirling somewhere through the sky
Under stars with fixed, ignited eyes, the rabbit
Slipped back onto the silvery lawn, for real,
While father stitched the world with words,
While daughter slept and dreamed the real.

Fine Weather, Utah, 30 March 2018

The windmills were all spinning as we passed,
Father and daughter in transit again,
Drought mountains handsomely mantled
In just enough later winter, early spring snow.
If I were to design a pocket-watch world
To drop on the heath of a parallel cosmos,
I would include wheels for the time span
Of mountains, spring-loaded but separate
From the tiny wheels of seasons, which
In turn would fly from a mechanism apart
From the minuscule wheel driving the human
Heart. That last, tiny detail, would keep
Time so precisely erratically that every day
And often every hour would see its slender
Gold sliver of a microscopic hand point
At a different frame of mind, the pointer
Skipping, stuttering and repeating to catch
With exactness the phases of my moods.
I woke in the small hours disgusted
With a world that would let me dream
Of ghosts, rose from bed with so many
Aches I could not see my way through
The day, found myself at noon on the road
Feeling almost contented with the hallucinatory
Near sameness of things, the wheel
In my hands, the sun on the dash, the road.
Now here I was passing through return again,
Daughter in the back seat posing riddles,
And the mouse-whisker fine line of the small
Gold hand pointed to contented again.
Surely, such precision could only prove
The intentional elegance of my designing.

Waves Lapping the Neighborhood, 29 March 2018

I sat on the stoop in late afternoon light,
Listening to unseen freight trains and cars,
Watching dog walkers and kids on their bikes.
The low sun coaxed shadows out of shingles
And blades of grass, and sidewalk cracks.
There’s something enduringly appealing
About the ugliness of corrugated things
Made glowing wonderscapes in low-angled light.
I inhaled and scrutinized what the bland day
Of those probing solar waves had left for me,
My skin teased by a breeze, and me thinking,
I want nothing more out of this than this.
Well, this and a few lines of poetry.

Parable of Bordernight, 28 March 2018

It is not a game, the dragging of the light
Away from the mountains. The game passes
Over night like a floating casino over a lake,
An astonishingly deep lake. Inside the boat,
More games, games within games, glittering
But rather dull on a night without weather,
Nothing to frighten the unmoored.
Only on the outer decks is there the faint
Slop of waves against the hull’s waterline.
On a still night, the casino is most glorious,
Serene and ghostly viewed from the shore,
A spectacularly phosphorescent monster
Drifting through the finite but borderless
Lake of the actual night. That monstrosity
Is what human brains have found in dreams,
A spinning, suspended, crosshatched
Dynamo of borders, watertight with rules.
If you lie awake, you can watch it float by
From the outside, a whole city sinking slowly
Until dawn drains the dark, when the ship
Lies exposed and eroding, bone white.

The Ghost of Houseguests Past, 27 March 2018

The words poured out of him in a string.
“To be honest, I had prepared for something
Else. To be honest, I had prepared for else
And nothing but else. To be honest, I had
Not prepared. And having not prepared
I could not possibly be prepared for this,
Only for some coincidental miracle of else
That, although unanticipated in any way,
Would have somehow matched what I was
Prepared to say.” And then he paused,
For breath, I thought, but no, he hadn’t
Paused. He had finished. He was done.
He sat, mugging a gloomy expression
But with smiling eyes, his hands in his lap,
Looking out at the sunset past the window.
You’re a piece of work, I thought, but I kept
My thoughts to myself because I thought
I might be unprepared for his response.

Memeny, 26 March 2018

Sooner or later, if not already, evolving
Culture will have to spawn some parasite
That evolves within culture itself. Imagine
A germ capable of decimating ideas
And technological traditions from within,
A fever of innovation, a plague leveling
Libraries and citadels of learning. Imagine
A word that could eat a word. The viral
Algorithms of hackers come close but
No cigar. This would have to be an idea
Fragment self-replicating and decimating
Whole systems of knowledge and belief.
One day all the knowledge will be gone
And the corpses of philosophies will rot.
Whatever notions survive that apocalypse
Will be hardened, selected for resistance.
But that will be the beginning, not the end.
After that self-generated cultural slaughter,
The real competition will be on, the real race
That a new world and Red Queen can never
Quit and never win. You and I will become,
Then, figments of a biocultural imagination,
Dark chunks of common fossils in the sands.

Wet Snow on the Roof at Midnight, 25 March 2018

It was one of those years when we had more
Snow in March than in January, when
One wondered for how long one could keep
Being surprised that it was another day,
Still alive. Of course, any entity wondering,
Barring AI, would have to be alive, but that
The day had gone on and another arrived
While oneself was still alive was somehow
Always a surprise. And after the mild winter,
When snow fell from days in late March,
One was even more surprised that a world
So trivially fickle could display itself as if
It were a great work in progress, as if it might
Have something interesting up its sleeve,
Have something to say to someone, hidden,
That someone might have reason to believe.

Crawling into Bed in Salt Lake City, Utah, 24 March 2018

As an adolescent, when my bones ached,
Thanks to the lovely punishment of my disease,
I would often have to wait a shuddering
Minute for the muscles in my legs to unclench
Whenever I sat down or got into bed. Later,
In my early twenties, I visited the quiescent
Family farm of a couple of friends, near
Flathead Lake in Western Montana. They had
No books in the farmhouse, no television,
No record collection, and of course this was
Long before smartphones, social media,
Or anyone had even coined the phrase
“The World Wide Web.” There was one
Cheap plastic transistor radio in the kitchen
That picked up a few scratchy country stations.
That was it. When everyone but me left
For a weekend of backcountry hiking, I had
To wait a day for my thoughts to unclench.
Finally, there was the evening I sat on the porch
In a straight-back chair with my hands in my lap
And watched the complete progress of nightfall,
From long afternoon shadows through to sunset,
To the first evening star, to thousands of them.
Then nothing ached and I relaxed. I need
Another slow of release of agony. I need
To wait for a night full of stars, nothing
To read, to see, to hear, to think in the dark

Windy One A.M., Salt Lake City, 23 March 2018

When I was a small boy with weak legs
Trying to pilot my adult-sized tricycle,
A three-wheeled bike with a basket in the back,
Suitable for portaging groceries or siblings,
I hated the wind. It was hard enough pedaling
That damned cumbersome thing, but it was
Almost impossible heading into the wind.
In canoes, too, the wind was a nuisance.
Unless it was exactly at my back, I had
To fight it to keep the boat pointed as I
Wanted. Trying to return to a camp or cabin
Across a windy lake alone in an aluminum
Grumman canoe could take all afternoon.
And yet I loved the howl of the wind around
The corner of a solemn house, still do.
I loved watching branches toss. Still do.
I loved the banshee bending white caps. Still do.
Why mention any of this, alone in bed
On a windy and wet, black wee morning
In Salt Lake, listening? Because it is the nature
Of all phenomena to be dual from any given
Perspective, dusk to dawn to dusk, because
No matter where a person stands or lurks,
The changing world that wraps itself around
Will bring, I guarantee, I promise, I swear,
Some gusty paradox of enchantment and despair.

The View Through a Spotted Window, 22 March 2018

The discovery, if it holds, is remarkable.
Something akin to a genocide occurred
In the British Isles thousands of years ago.
Within a few centuries, the farmers in situ
Largely disappeared, replaced by descendants
Of nomads from the steppes. I look up
From the research article and stare out
Of a sun-struck, dusty window. Horse people.
What a globe altering suite of events,
The first taming and breeding of horses
Somewhere on the Central Asian steppes.
How many technologies—wheels, wagons,
Chariots, stirrups, mounted archers, cavalry—
Depended on those events? How much
Mythology? How many, many invasions?
The global terror of ruthless savages in tents?
One could write a history of it all, from Eurasia
Across North America, the glory and the gore
Of people dependent on horses to rule the world.
That would be a book. A bird shadow crosses
The window. For the past several years
I’ve driven to work past a paddock of horses
Kept by a dude ranch. They browse. I wave.
My ancestors' ancestors. Their ancestors' ancestors.
What have our lineages done to this earth?
And now they’re quaint. I bend my head
Back to the page, imagining from the results
Of deciphered aDNA, how the end for the first
Horseless farmers of Britain came. Well,
As it did for the hunter-gatherers of Britain
Before them and the archaic human species
Before them. One at a time, no matter how slow
Or sudden, how many. One at a time find the end.

Merlin, After the Vernal Equinox, 2018

What would be the opposite of dementia?
To be the last person to whom the world
Is utterly, insufferably boring and familiar,
While all the rest stumble about perplexed
By the newness, weirdness, and uncertainty
Of everything they perceive, every event
Being another suite of baffling perceptions
For them. For you, it’s all routine, the ritual,
The cycles, the chores, the names. The sun
Comes up when and as you expected, while
The new dawn startles them. The phases
Of the moon circling over your head you know
Like the back of your hand, even as they ask
You what that sliver of light cut from the night
Might mean. You are a stranger in their
Strange land. It’s more than you can stand.

The Sorcerer’s Testimony, 20 March 2018

Space is emergent and not fundamental,
An outfit the cosmos created as it changed,
A garment illustrating and illustrated by time.
The body that stays up late endures this,
These illustrations as they grow wearisome,
The formal robes of a sorcerer being sewn
Directly onto his frame as he yawns and longs
For sleep. Thousands of ongoing cycles
Without a break between any of them weave
The dizzying patterns he grasps as memory,
As past. Everywhere he sees apparent gaps
And nonconformities that, closely observed,
All also appear to be patched. He sways
In the drift of his own cumulative exhaustion.
The concept of bearing witness is human,
One of our myriad social stratagems, not
An aspect of the interrelationships of any
Of the other known beasts of the cosmos
We’ve yet witnessed. Our ancestors thrived
By keeping wary eyes on each other,
By reporting the gossip. The sorcerer knows
He’s thus only a byproduct of a peculiar type
Of bestial success, one watcher of the other,
Of the rest of the changing universe that shifts
Without regard to witnesses, that could not
Possibly care less. These robes hang like lead,
But he sees they are beautiful in every thread.

Snow Anvil, Utah, 19 March 2018

The snow squall squatted, a cold man-o’war,
A frosted anvil sunk in the late-winter desert.
The highway seemed to curve to avoid it,
The way a line of poetry, the language
Of a poem, sometimes seems to bend
In an impossible way to avoid the hint
Of an accumulating narrative weather.
Nothing going to impede motion over this
Sly double pretense, apparent motion that was
Motionless, apparent motionlessness that never
Quit moving. A few outer bits of snow hissed
And spit against the windshields of the long-haul
Big rigs ignoring it. Nothing much had
To happen, had to happen, had to happen.
There’s never a true story in whatever happens.

After St. Patrick’s Day, 2018

Compare and contrast, went the instructions
In so many ancient high school and college
Exams, not a few of which I gave myself,
Although I tried to avoid the exact phrase,
As if humans needed to be told to behave
Like humans. Might as well give a worm
An exam that instructs it to eat dirt. The trick
Was always in the speed, efficiency, detail,
And creativity of the instinctive act, not
In the instinctive act itself. We only need
Two named clumps of phenomena shoved
Cheek by jowl or yoked by a common word,
Suggested metaphor, trait, or a similar date
For idle memory to immediately begin
Masticating the comparison. Paddy’s Day,
A light snow falling over a grey Salt Lake,
Nothing like St Patrick’s Day, say, eleven
Years ago, when I, as a body ancestral
To this one still using the same name, rose
In the front guest room of two friends’ home
In Albuquerque, packed in the sun, drove
Through reservations to Moab. That man
Was forty-four, thin, childless, had just filed
For divorce from a lovely, alcoholic wife,
Was a tenured full professor of Behavioral
Sciences and Anthropology, had spent
The previous spring break week driving
Alone through Utah and New Mexico,
Holing up for days in Los Alamos, wandering
The cavate remains of Tsankawi, alternately
Blissed out and feeling full of self pity.
Arriving in Moab that St. Patrick’s Saturday,
That man, who was reasonably well off,
Ate pasta at a tourist spot on the main drag
Calm under the few stars cutting through
Then read a history of local uranium mining
Back the hotel. Then to bed, having noticed
An ad for the Moab Music Fest a few months
Later in September and made a mental note,
Not a clue how much of the next decade,
Including the conception of his only child
Would follow from that stop in Moab,
That pleasant evening at the cafe, that note.
And this man? Body lowers into a chair,
Heavily, watching daughter and cousin play
In the falling snow, considering the many
Deaths and changes contained within
The frame defined by the name, St. Patrick’s.

Noon, Afternoon, 17 March 2018

On the noon hour, the electronic carillon
Played the algorithms for “Michelle ma Belle.”
One bird in the sun kept up a repetitive chirp
With a rising intonation, like a teenager
Or a question. I have changed my mind
About life, or about my immediate future
At least. Now, I mean to stay. Life, however,
Changes its mind about no life, so I know
It’s still not really mine to say. But for today,
Daughter in the house with a hacking cough
Watching her favorite mermaid shows, zoo
Visit out of the question despite the sunshine,
Last night’s restless dreams of drowning
In my own trivial plans and failures, abetted
By the usual shadow characters of dreams,
Put away, I’ll sit a spell out in the yard, sunning
And listening to whatever now follows
The carillon, notes gone, algorithms stowed away.

But the zoo was not out of the question, not
For the one with the hacking cough who wanted
To do something fun. So we went, and all
This my pseudometaphysical bullshit aside,
We visited all the exhibits and had a good time.
Daughter rode the snow leopard on the carousel
And scrutinized the actual specimen, as well
As the African lions, the California sea lions,
The howler monkeys, the bobcat, the grizzlies,
The square-lipped rhinos, the markhors,
The otters, the jungle fowl, the silverback gorilla.
The gorilla, for his part, took a seat in the sun
In his backyard enclosure, looking handsome,
And scratched a cheek meditatively, the Godfather
Staring levelly across the vacant air at me.

Thundersnow, 16 March 2018

Around midnight, a few rumbles and flashes
Just as the rain changed over to wet snow.
Perhaps you have lived your life somewhere
Where this is impossible or almost common.
In this life’s composition, merely rare. Rare
Has been common in this life. In this life,
A great many things have been neither
Common nor impossible, only rare. Defying
The odds in preferable fashion, for instance,
Has been rare. Days when something worth
Reconsidering the nature of one’s existence
Has occurred have been rare. All rare events
Compiled together have remained, each
By each, rare, which is the common state
Of rarity here. Bone tired at the close
Of another bodily day has never been rare,
So body rears up on elbows and tilts a head,
Not to miss the rare flash of lightning
Greenishly illuminating the common flakes.
There is a world where all is common except
The rare, where hardly any coincidence is
Ever unexpected in the lightning-haunted air.

Goblin Valley, Utah, 15 March 2018

My wheels were rolling down an almost
Empty road on Pi day, thin veils of rain
Hanging in the distance, black cattle
Behind fences, a curious piece of purple
Litter in the center of the highway,
On my way to Hanksville to rendezvous
With daughter, who had been out camping.
I saw the car containing her pass the other
Way, and as I turned around to head north
Again to Goblin Valley to catch her there,
Instead, the thought rotating in my head
Was that we have as near as proved the fact
That mathematics is neither the eternal key
That turns all pins and tumblers of this
Universe, nor the pure creation of humanity.
Neither can the cosmos compass an exact
Mathematical relationship to its whole self
Nor can the math be cut to fit a human box.
All those wonderful, irrational, infinite ratios—
Log two, the square root of two, the golden
Ratio, e, pi calculated out to twenty-two
Trillion digits, a measure more accurate
Than the universe and equally incomplete—
Remind us that our minor imaginations, knit
Together, bursts of lust and blood, can game
Larger palaces than any n-dimensional cosmos
Because our maths admit the infinite mess
Of that concept of infinity. I was thinking this
As I rolled into the state park parking lot
Littered with wheeled vehicles proportional
To within a proton of true by two, three dozen
Digits of the infinite’s irrational approximation
In every dark, inflated tire. From one such
Collection of circles surrounded by hoodoos
Stepped my imperfectly circular, infinite child.

Then Everyone and He Stopped Breathing, 14 March 2018

We sat at the table, talking about sisters and daughters.
We sat in the yard and talked about partners.
When the shade from the house blocked the sun,
We returned inside and talked about geology,
The names and locations of Utah rock formations.
We shared a travel article on Siccar Point,
The first cliff used to illustrate Deep Time.
After dinner, we retreated to our rooms.
There are more things in this world to talk about
Than there are things we are able to do,
But we do as much as we do because we talk
So much about what we can and can’t yet do.
It was the night that Stephen Hawking died,
Whose maths suggested even black holes seeped
Blackbody radiation, and whose life, extended,
Suggested even death could be defied.

Reading Lamp, 13 March 2018

Joe saved a 1950 anthology from a stack

Of old hardbacks about to be garage-saled:

105 Living Authors Present the World’s Best,

Edited and introduced by Whit Burnett.

Peculiar collection, exemplary of an era

When social science enjoyed a brief ascendancy,

The whole thing put together by balloting,

As if voting and quantification made it scientific.

In the immediate wake of World War II,

457 names of then-living authors were circulated 

To themselves and to other living authors,

Not one of them living anymore, I shouldn't guess,

To the officers of European and American PEN,

To the editors of the Columbia Dictionary

Of Modern European Literature, to dozens

Of U.S. magazine editors, bookstore personnel, 

Librarians, college presidents, public figures,

And subscribers to The Saturday Review

Of Literature. 643 completed ballots were returned.

Mr. Burnett then attempted correspondence

With each of the top vote-getters, requesting

Them to recommend a selection of their own

They would prefer to see in the anthology,

Which was awfully decent of him. Shaw,

Who ranked number one, was prickly when

The project was described to him as a quest

To find the 100 best living writers. Replying 

On a penny postcard, he protested. “You class

Me as one of the HUNDRED BEST. I am

Humiliated. I thought I was in the top ten.”

Even when the exact tally was relayed to him,

And he was told his name led all the rest,

He did not relent. The anthology’s proclaimed

Greatest living author of 1950 was not, in the end,

Contained in its index. The others were mostly

More congenial, and some were clearly flattered

Among the 93 men and 12 women represented.

There’s nothing like an old anthology compiled

By some weird methodology to render a snapshot

Perspective on an obsolescent canonicity.

By lamplight in the evening, I went spelunking,

Enjoying an odd essay by Lin Yutang, a story 

By Dinesen I hadn’t previously read, a Nehru

Piece on prison, the scene of the Duchess

Dressing for dinner by Vita Sackville-West.

But the excerpt from an autobiographical

Novel by Sigrid Unset, author previously unknown 

To me, who had only barely managed to slip

Her choice of her own work into the volume

Just ahead of her death, summed things best:

“She seemed to see it all—men dying and dying,

They had gone on dying through all the thousands

Of years, and among all those forgotten dead

There had always been some whose loss

Their nearest and dearest thought irreparable 

And of whom they said: ‘Few better will come

After.’ And then they went on living.” Rest

In peace, Sigrid Unset, among the literary dead.

Cutbank, 12 March 2018

There was a kind of poetry that called
For humbly manly language about barns,
Mowers, livestock, guns, and trout streams,
Every word unvarnished but joined and sanded,
Tongue and groove, by calloused minds,
That sort of thing. You advertised the craft,
Showed the authenticity of material, boasted
Only implicitly by showing patient, honest labor.
I miss it. A little bit. It was like opening a cabinet
Of oak and cedar to see how smoothly drawers
Slid, how neatly the doors and lids shut
With a click, knowing the proportions were
Useless except for storing jewelry and delicates,
The world being wild, no matter how we tame it,
No matter how we tame ourselves, no matter
How we shape our ends to fit it. The storm
That knocks the oaks and cedars all to splinters
Doesn’t pause at well-made walls and furniture.
Carve it how you will, you can’t commune with it.
The past you cut and shaved cannot contain
The streaming prey and predatory future of it.

Air Quality, Salt Lake City, Utah, 11 March 2018

There is no obstacle but circumstance
Protects my growing daughter from the storm
That twists around the spinning globe because
The globe is spinning. Every disaster
Of weather derives from Earth’s regular
Periodicity. I watch the haze
Back up over the valley of Salt Lake,
The way custom and ceremony drowse
Until clouds of beauty and innocence
Grow dark and heavy and break. Who can breathe
Knowing how the ritual and routine
Combine to clog and then convulse the mind?
Our only hope on an unfair planet
Is that misfortune’s confusion skips us
And the unfair lottery favors us.

Post No Paid Bills, 10 March 2018

Humans are creators of the destiny
That authors us, authors of the destiny
Created thus. If one of us, timorous, exists
Past the date allotted for escape, the bliss
Of defeating fate hisses, gaseous, away
From the balloon of the skull made of dust.
I am the guest of this house, a glossy speck
Of embodiment, a muscle’s irritant solved,
Nacreous. The house, itself, is oblivious.
I arise in the morning, bankrupt, invidious,
My history mockery, my prospects hideous,
My continued self a merely invisible trajectory
Of its artillery’s derivative calculus, soaring
Long after the exhaustion of any original
Gunpowder stimulus. I am a guest. I earn
No hold that is certain, not even tenuous.
I thought I had a lien on life, could count
Myself at least a poltergeist, but there’s no
Force in a tenant’s blunderbuss. Ridiculous.

The Syriac, 9 March 2018

Six years ago yesterday, I wrote a poem, bitter
As Stephen Crane’s heart, about the children of Homs,
About all human children and the terrible gift
For cooperation that coordinates our wars.
Yesterday, I woke to a report from the BBC,
A velvety voiced announcement stating aid
Convoys into another besieged Syrian city,
Or the remains of what had once been a city,
Were once again delayed. The same war,
Six years later, uninterrupted, still in the news,
Still pinioning victims or scattering them to the world.
It’s not just the capacity for death that stuns.
It’s that capacity to draw it out into torture,
Inherent not only in warfare, but in all cancers.
It’s how bodies, families, villages, civilizations
Must so often be exhausted, shredded, dragged
Through intricate alleyways of ambushes
And partial recoveries before finally allowed to end.
Or maybe I’m just exhausted myself. The war,
A long, grinding roar from the far side of my world
That has troubled news and political views,
That threatens a greater Armageddon any day
But not in my neighborhoods in any obvious way,
Continues. I have heard too much, read too
Much for my own or anyone’s good. I know
For how many centuries wars have trawled
Their chainmail dragnets across the deserts
Of increasingly barren Syria. Dozens. Dozens.
I know a heart of art and architecture, of faith
And literature beat the blood across those rocks.
Gardens and trees of knowledge started somewhere
Near there, I know. I know. I know I should
Pull myself together, stop blaming cooperation
For murder. I lie in bed alone, a bag of bones,
Weary of quoting others’ and my own poems.

All the Rest Are Ghosts, 8 March 2018

Dreams that don’t exist or exist on trust,
God and the devil are always with us.
You think you’re dreaming something new. You know
You’re the new number in the same old show
That’s been running a quarter-million years
Or so, the tunes on which all kids are reared.
They’re born prepared to weigh up faith and doubt.
We all think we’re haunted from inside out,
When most of what we know drifts outside in.
Billions of deceased voices sing of sin.
Worlds can improve. We can move them along.
Your problem’s not the choice of song. It’s song.

El Shaddai Revisited, Empty House, Utah, 7 March 2018

One of the names for Israel’s God in the Torah

Was El Shaddai, typically rendered in English

As something along the lines of God Almighty,

Although scholarly translations leave it as is.

For a boy raised on the King James Version

And who, as a teenager, spent a few weeks

Enchanted by Frank Herbert’s Dune novels,

El Shaddai echoed as a dreamlike resonance,

A mysterious and formless shadow in mind,

Especially as no scholar knows for sure

Whence the name came or what it first meant.

The one part, El, is easy. That’s the word

For the Canaanite high god, and the common

Noun, god. God Shaddai. But even the syntax

Of the phrase seems open to interpretation.

Toponym, cognomen, or attribute of a god? 

God of Shaddai. God named Shaddai. God

With the characteristic of being Shaddai.

Even in the Torah, its use is spookily shadowy,

A reach back to a time already ancient then.

In moments of revelation, as to Moses,

The God of Israel deploys the name to identify

Himself to His people as being the same

As the God of their ancestors, El Shaddai,

Name by which ancestors knew Him then.

Even the etymology of Shaddai is speculative,

With links suggested to terms for fertility,

Wilderness, destructiveness, and mountains.

Might have been the name of an actual place,

But if so, the location of that place is lost.

It is, in fine, almost wholly untranslatable.

It conjures something, nonetheless, a prayer,

Not to the later YHWH of priest and covenant

Who claims to speak for and as El Shaddai, but

To a destructive god of wild, fertile mountains,

God of a former world that never really was.

There’s just too much time between never,

Possibly, probably, and for sure, those four

Courses against a stop of the lips whispering,

Mumbling their wish to address the lost Lord

Who moves underneath all well-worn words.

We’re in the Middle of Nowhere, 6 March 2018

Said daughter in the backseat, somewhere
In the open middle of Utah, mountains,
Snow, open range and no buildings in sight.
As the driver, I parsed nowhere in terms
Of distance between gas stations and to help
In the case of emergencies. When I wasn’t
Thinking too much on disaster, I shared her joy
At the great sweep that frees the eye and clears
The head. Every journey survived unharmed
Leads on to ordinary chores and setbacks,
The little business of being a little body, but
There in the middle of nowhere, daughter
Happy in the back, sun on the road, we flew.

Non-Locality, 5 March 2018

What happens next is intimately related
To what happened last, but what happens
Here has no relation to what happens there,
Not when here and there are far apart
And next and last are intimate. What does this
Tell us? What happens in one half of the box
Is independent of what happens in the other,
At least until you throw gravity in the box,
And then everything inside the box sags
With holography, and spacetime’s no longer
Fundamental. Gravity, author of nothing,
Creator of our ends, reduces dimensions.
Everything in three is secretly coded in two.
That much is physics. The minor metaphysics
Of this confection corkscrewing through you,
This strung-out sequence of spring-loaded
Phrases, would like to suggest a further reduction
To the singular dimension secreted as time,
Secret or not, call it the pointillist principle.
The information needed to encode the world
Is “dramatically compressible” to the fact change
Changes at rates that change at changing rates.

Quiet Reading at Home, 4 March 2018

What draws me to read about archaeology
Isn’t just the thrill of more vividly imagining
Lost worlds, it’s the vertiginous wooziness
That comes from turning the telescope
Upside down and considering our horror
Or at least our incomprehensible weirdness
To the people whose remains we’re rooting
About in like a bin, often literally their middens,
If they were to hallucinate one fine afternoon
Down by the temple or at the burial ground
The world that would one day sift them.
Perhaps they believed only God or gods
Would disinter and resurrect them. Perhaps,
They forecast an eternal kingdom of spirits.
See, I read of an underwater discovery
Of a seven-thousand year old burial ground
Off the coast of Florida only yesterday. Likely,
The people who placed their people’s remains
In that spot thought neither of monotheism
Nor kingdoms, and therefore their analogies
For imagining the world of the dead involved
Hunting and maybe stockaded forts, stone
Blades and spirits of beasts, a few now extinct.
Whatever they imagined, I’m willing to bet
My afterlife it wasn’t scuba divers with metal
And plastic tools, laser levels, aqualungs.
We are used to reading about archaeologists.
We imagine archaeologists finding us. Likely
The ends of our remains will be as strange,
Or would be as strange if we could remain,
To us as underwater archaeologists to them.
And there’s a thought to shiver any thought
Given to how I dispose these bones in repose.

What Others Think, 3 March 2018

Unless your solipsism proves correct,
You will remain in someone’s memory
For a while, and in the end, your remains
Will consist of what surviving humans think
Of you, so long as they think of you. Mozart
Did not become music when he died,
He became what people made of his notes,
As Yeats became his admirers, as you will
Become whatever living others make of you,
Whether you left them something or not.
Opinion is the last of us, not the least of us,
However much we try to shrug it off in order
To be able to carry on. And when no one
Is left who has any opinion of you, no idea
Of what you were or tried to do or did,
That’s the outer death, the one you’ll get
Unless your solipsism proves correct.

It’s Peaceful Here, 2 March 2018

The step-grandfather cooks and keeps an eye
On basketball games and the weather, worrying
About an incoming storm over the weekend.
The father provides companionship and slight
Tutelage for the daughter as they create
Games of origami scraps, furnish houses
Of pretend, heap up a snowman decked out
With a weakening helium balloon leftover
From the grandfather’s seventieth birthday.
The window is rattling the gutters and the sky
Is grey all day, but for a few hours the three
Of them amuse each other and hold the world
Together, together keep the world at bay.

Lost in Time Clockworks, Saint George, Utah

It’s the vastness of the small amazes me.
Driving down the interstate from Salt Lake
To Hurricane to pick up daughter, I saw
A white truck’s rear roof corner shining
In the morning sun as my car momentarily,
Coincidentally synchronized in parallel
And both vehicles rushed down the road
Together, paired in seemingly fixed relation.
My eye was caught and distracted, perhaps
Dangerously, by a small scuff mark up high,
Just below the edge of the truck’s roof.
For a brief space of time I was mesmerized.
I could sense my whole body tilting
Into the enormous numbers of atoms
And the proportionally much greater voids
Between the subatomic wave-particles,
Measurable millions and millions of them,
That made up those trivial scratch marks,
Forming no particular pattern or omen, all
Smaller than my fingers. I felt dizzy with it,
The size and scope of the inconsequential.
And then our invisible tether uncoupled,
And the two vehicles moved out of sync,
And my word-mind snagged on the sign
In black letters on the white truck’s side:
“Lost in Time Clockworks, Saint George, UT.”