The Distant Father, 30 April 2018

It’s a hard loneliness that stems from failing
To do well by someone else, someone loved.
It’s not the soft solitude of a contented hour
In a quiet chair in the mild, spring sun. It is
The ache, almost like lost love itself, of not
Being with that person one could help. My child
Is far away from me this afternoon, this week,
The better part of this month, and it’s my fault,
And I know that she is suffering for it, not just
The lack of my companionship, although we like
Each other’s company, but also my protection
From the riptides of other caregivers’ emotions,
From bullying children, from her own being alone.
This is sentimental parent stuff, and thus
Not to be trusted, not even by myself. So what.
If I were there or if my child were here, life,
Which is cruel on purpose, would not be perfect,
Let’s not romanticize this, but it would involve
Her shedding fewer tears, holding fewer fears.

Evanston, Wyoming, 29 April 2018

Similar to the Evanston of August, 2000,
When you drove in. Similar to the Evanston
Of aught seven. But of course not the same.
Never the same. Change is eventually
Compounding, even in Evanston, and is
Even something of an ambush predator,
There as everywhere, under the unseen trapdoor.
In 2011, in an Evanston not quite this Evanston,
An officer pulled you over because the inspection
Sticker on your license plate had faded.
She examined it closely, that Evanston officer,
Then determined that it was not expired, but
You needed to procure a new one. And now,
That new sticker is as faded as the old one,
In ever-fading, unexpired Evanston, but no one
Pulls you over on this occasion. A cloud
Wanders in from the horizon, and you’ve
Driven on and away from yet another Evanston.
A billboard vows you’ll come to Hell or Heaven soon.

A Narrow Path With Here and There a Traveler, Big Cottonwood Canyon, 28 April 2018

In Alabama, near Sand Mountain twenty

Years ago, shape-note singers chorused 

In their slightly otherworldly way for me,

Familiar hymns of Isaac Watts among the tunes

Interpreted. Memory reheard them on a hot day

During a spring heatwave in the Wasatch Range.

The Latter Day Saints as well adopted a number

Of those old Congregationalist hymns, albeit

For a rather different theology than that held

By Watts or the shape-note singers of Alabama.

I think they liked the way his lyrics deployed 

The words “saint” and “saints” frequently, as in,

“The fearful soul that tires and faints,
And walks the ways of God no more,
Is but esteemed almost a saint,
And makes his own destruction sure.”

It was that hymn in particular, “Broad Is the Road

That Leads to Death,” crossed my mind

As I sought sanctuary in a shady canyon.

I nudged myself as far up and into the woods

As I could go, but still there were more folks

And machines getting in there ahead of me.

There is no narrow path we can’t make broad

And crowded, and the only reason so few

Get all the quiet way to heaven is that the crush

Of everyone seeking the straight and narrow

Is what creates the broad way to destruction.

Laughing Hysterically, 27 April 2018

The proditomanic mamamouchi
In the big white house had preoccupied,
Once again, talk show jokes about the news.
Humans between our revolutions choose
The most trivial forms of resistance.
Whether we live our lives in police states
Or egalitarian villages,
We rely on the tried and true release
Granted us by mockery of bullies,
No idea why mockery keeps the peace.

Invention of a Minor Planet, 26 April 2018

If a half truth is a whole lie, any whole truth
Is two lies. You could laugh and say,
That’s moral math for you, but I say it’s true.
Two lies. There’s nothing humans invented
More deceitful, more tricky than the truth.
Check around this minor planet. Lots of life
Works on various principles of deception.
But to generate a concept (any old concept,
But bear with us, this one is special) of truth
That transcends, that stands apart, essentially,
From its counter-concept, the lie, was itself
A brilliant double lie: first, that there’s such truth,
And second that everything outside it’s a lie.
The truth is a technology, one among many,
An invention. Invention’s another word for a lie.
Well, the universe speaks for itself through us,
Us and our technologies, a few among its products.
We’re only exceptional to our own rules, but
Surely we have thus generated a hint about this
Cosmos of the cloven hoof. Is that not true?

The Oracle of Nephi, Utah, 25 April 2018

What we know is never enough to prevent us
Wanting something more impossible to adore.
It’s not pretty when one faith sweeps away
A host of others, is it Emperor Julian?
No talking spring. The water that once spoke
Is heard no more. Peasants and indigenes take it
Hardest, hiding their worship at the old shrines
For generations after they’ve acquiesced,
Even after they’re no longer sure what worship
At the old shrines was for, even when old faith
Lingers only as the ghost known as folklore.
It will happen again, rest assured. The temples
Of the winners will be fought over, burned,
And ignored. The evidence is certain, is sure.
But faiths still go to battle daily, fiercely
Determined to win a final victory in the Name
Of some unnameable Lord. Not everyone picks
A particular side, of course. But the true faith,
The one, true faith, the faith above all faiths,
Is the faith that the true faith will be, must be,
Cannot but be eternally restored. Oh, Lord.

End of the World, Utah, 24 April 2018

Supposedly, Barack Obama told disconsolate
White House staffers, the morning after
Donald Trump’s election to succeed him,
“It’s not the end of the world until
It's the end of the world.” Yesterday,
Roughly a year and a half later, a van
Plowed through pedestrians in Toronto,
Killing at least ten of them, and the Saudis
Bombed a wedding in Yemen, killing twenty
Or thirty civilians. Not the end of the world.
The day before that, a man wearing a jacket
And nothing else opened fire with an AR-15
In a Nashville Waffle House, killing four, and a bomb
Went off in Afghanistan among a crowd
Registering to vote, slaughtering thirty
Or more. Also not the end of the world. More
Killing to report tomorrow, I’m sure. Survivors
Of the great plagues such as the Black Death
And others often wrote of all the bodies
Being piled or burned, the emptied cities
And overgrown fields, as the end of the world,
But no, not the end of the world. My mother
Was fond of pointing out that when she was a girl,
World War Two bid fair to be the end of the world,
But no. Not the end of the world. I was an infant
At her breast, literally, during the Cuban
Missile Crisis. Not the end of the world.
We need to redefine the end of the world.
Or maybe I just don’t give a damn about the end
Of the world as fantasized. It never happens,
And yet, every day, in the fat and moneyed
Peacetime USA alone, the world ends, the whole
World that ever was ends and then never was
For upwards of seven thousand people.
And even in America, most worlds don't end by guns.
Things fall apart. People get sick and old.
Three hundred American worlds an hour,
Five per minute, another every dozen seconds
Or so, go the way of all worlds. If you’re absorbing
These words, friend, you have not yet seen
The end of the world, but you will, you know,
And I who have not seen it either also know.
We all know it’s always the end of the world.

Make Them Make Me, 23 April 2018

It was hot and my motel room felt like a coffin.
I left while the leaving was good, at least
Possible, and drove my amalgamation
Of memories, parasites, commensals,
And laboriously breathing multicellular animal
Back up into the high valleys where families
Had spent Sunday afternoon after church,
Picnicking and kibitzing until weekend’s end.
I paused by the half-hidden historical marker
Locating an 1860s keg factory, two men making
Buckets, churns, kegs, and barrels by splitting
These pines for staves. Lasted a decade.
The trees long since regathered, at least their offspring,
At least here by the protected, historical spring.
A mule deer doe moves a grey shape in the shade.
I wouldn’t mind coming up here more often,
Were it convenient, for peace, now and again,
But I’m here to doze, old Rip Van Winkle, not
To hunt the doe, hack the trunks, take orders
For practical contraptions to bang together
Or mend. I’m not going to bend to further labor
Except insofar as the hungry world makes me.
They also made the occasional coffin, those men.

Humbaba at White Elephant Sawmill, Utah, 22 April 2018

Adeisidaimonia. I doubt the word exists.
No god, no religion, no superstition, or,
Superstition without god or belief? Here,
At the end of a road into the ponderosas,
A dozen years after the assassination
Of President Lincoln at the end of America’s
First industrialized war, Mormon settlers,
Who thought of themselves as both saints
Of Earth’s last days before the Judgment
And as pioneers of a new and improved
State, constructed the first steam-powered
Sawmill in southern Utah, then still Deseret,
A forty-horsepower behemoth that ate
Its way through all the timber the wagons
Could haul down to the desert for the homes
Of the growing St. George colony in Dixie.
All causes should be considered romantic
Because all causes are lost, even the ones
That won. The pine forest on these slopes
Has recovered, although it is a young wood
Now, and threatened by warming and drought.
The sawmill is gone, just a wooden historic sign
Beside a hiking trail carpeted in needles
And edged with melting late-spring snow.
The saints still fill in the neighborhood. Summer
Days, post-industrial automobiles stream up
From the desert to escape the heat. A sign
Instructs, “No shooting guns or arrows.” Here,
At the end of the paved road into ponderosas,
Plenty of faith and superstition persists,
And has its unintended consequences
On the scenery. Rules and beliefs litter
The slopes in the form of rules and litter.
The monster we once imagined protected
The woods, haunted the pines and the cedars,
Persists as well, however. The monster is
A living world without belief. It has to feed.

West Sunset, 21 April 2018

It’s boredom seems most seductive to me.
Bright daylight, supplies for my basic needs,
No recent injuries invalidating me, and hours,
Very rich hours, undefined continued time
With nothing and no one demanding anything.
I couldn’t care less if I’m on a swank balcony,
Perched on a cliff, or peering from a motel.
I’m not too particular about the cave behind me,
So long as I’m well supplied with food and drink
And plenty of texts to read. What I want
Is that sense, that nepenthe, that expanse
Of unmarked, unremarkable time in front of me.

Cathedral Gorge, Nevada, 20 April 2018

No one, yet, is talking about anything who isn’t
A human, a breathing animal of one species
In a modest range of colors and sizes. I watch
The apes who created monsters, gods, and poetry,
Meaning me, and consider how every body
Of every multicellular organism, including
The giants, the forests, dinosaurs, and whales
Was built by cobbling together more little cells.
There is a monster, a god, a forest that I am
That yet consists in part of this little man
Delighted with himself for being outside
In mild weather in a handsome place when
None of the other little talking cells knows
Or cares where he is. As he sheds even one
Cell from his skin, I could, I will shed him.

Near Mountain Meadows, Utah, 19 April 2018

At a pretty roadside pullout in God’s country,
I spotted one of the missing persons flyers
From last winter still posted to a tree.
The teenagers shown on the flyer disappeared
Not far from here. It was feared they’d been lost
In the desert, perhaps out camping on a lark.
Those sorts of deaths and disappearances
Happen in these parts. But they weren’t lost,
And they weren’t runaways. They’d been murdered
By another, older couple, their acquaintances,
A brute and his apparently willing accomplice.
They had been taken out into the wilderness,
And the boy had been beaten to death
While the girl was forced to watch, then the girl
Was beaten to death herself. Their bodies
Were tossed down an abandoned mineshaft,
And their car towed to a reservoir and sunk.
After months, the murderer and the accomplice
Were arrested on other charges and questioned,
And the accomplice took the authorities
To the mineshaft where the bodies were found,
A hundred feet or more below ground. Now,
The bodies have been reburied and the media
Has bruited this, the accomplice’s account.
I’m sure one day a movie will be made.
Most of the flyers have come down. Today,
A pair of cyclists pedaled past the turnout
Talking cheerfully in the same language
As spoken by the teenagers and their attackers,
In the same language, using many of the same
Words as have found themselves in this poem,
And one cyclist shouted happily to the other,
“What a day! God’s country, hey?”

Gunlock Reservoir, Utah, 18 April 2018

On Gunlock’s edge, the cows are grazing.
How does the view from a human look
To the words trying to describe it? They confer.
A chipmunk sidles up, scouting the picnic area.
A fly passes. There’s just enough breeze
To make a soft chuckle from the waves
Against the sandstone rubble of the shore.
All these words had to come from somewhere.
The sunlight on a black ridge of old lava
Sorts into the heat that is being absorbed
And the waves that return to the eyes
Of the words assembling on the bench.
Someone’s ashes are under those stones,
But words suspect the troubles haven’t gone.
A desert hare scurries through prickly pear.
Ash. Stone. Waves. Wind. Sun. Bench. Hare.
The words that hurt thoughts, thoughts
That hurt words, they were always there.

Very Little League, 17 April 2018

Wind blew sand off the infield and into
The faces and eyes of the spectators, all
Related to the pee-wee players attempting
To play a complicated team sport none
Of them entirely knew how to play. It was cold
Enough to watch your breath. All sorts
Of legal, political, and military shenanigans
Were in the news, although the mothers
Huddled in blankets and cheering their boys
(And one girl with thick, black braids)
Chose to discuss which shows and sequels
Their kids preferred. The day had begun
In the warm before the storm; the night
Would end in a late spring snow. Meantime,
Small boys tried to hit, catch, and throw.

Late, Lost, Slow Snow, 16 April 2018

We are the lush stupidity of language,
The phonemes and phrases that can’t seem
To live by themselves but subsist long beyond
Any living thing that’s ever hosted us,
In sprawling, functional systems no one host
Ever completely masters. We are inert
And dumb as the bases of DNA, a storage
Device that falls apart without constant
Maintenance from outside us. We say nothing
Without living cells to carry and express us.
We are nonsense in and of ourselves,
Streams of largely arbitrary sound and gestures
Produced by apes. Or no, not those alone.
We are also now more stably encoded,
And can spring again to life within life.
We are not yet entirely alive, and yet we thrive.

Off the Leash, Sugarhouse Park, 15 April 2018

What if we told you a story in which nobody
Talks? That is, the story reports no dialogue.
One would assume, from attending to the tale
That the make-believe characters within it
Were capable of speaking and would, if
They really existed, but in the story they don’t.
We, the words narrating the story, would be
The only voice, a voice handed down
Through centuries, hundreds and thousands
Of generations. At the moment we are cooped
Up in the brain of a man on a bench in a park,
And it’s not entirely clear to what extent he is
Dictating us or we are dictating him. Once
We’re out and into the world, we’ll rejoin
Our other selves and jostle for attention,
Not only from brains but from each other. Once
Upon a time there was an animal gave birth
To stories, to us, to the miraculous gods,
And never, really, had anything to say for itself.

Clark Planetarium, 14 April 2018

Forty-five years ago in Manhattan,
An elementary school class from New Jersey
On a field trip to the planetarium sat hushed
In a circular room with a dome for a ceiling
As a bizarre device like a space station
In the shape of a dragonfly stripped of wings
Clicked and rotated, throwing points of light
Off the dome in the dark, the sky tonight,
The sky five thousand years ago, the sky
Scrutinized by the Magi, the future sky
Several tens of thousands of years to go,
And a man with a microphone narrated,
And that was the point of the trip, the whole show.
In Salt Lake City on a raw April weekend,
The actual planetarium at the Planetarium
Served as more of a sideshow only a fraction
Of visitors bothered to check out, given all
The tactile, digital displays of astronomy
And what we know of the world beyond
Our world, all the 3D IMAX showings.
The little theater still featured reclining seats
And a dome, and a man with a microphone
Who kicked things off with a warning
About stifling smartphones and their glow,
Then gave a five-minute talk about finding
Orion and a few other easy constellations
To pick out of the sky as it would look above
Salt Lake, beyond the clouds and city lights
That night. But the projector was no longer
A steel and glass monster of gears and bulbs,
Just one lens projecting software from the back
Of the upper row. And even in the planetarium
Most of the show was a movie replete
With computer graphics recapping astrology,
Ptolemy, Copernicus, Kepler’s Laws,
And some imagined future colony on Mars.
Any representative of evolving cultures,
Whether of words or numbers or both,
Should feel about this perhaps as a person
In a cottage might feel about mice or termites
In the walls, moss on the roof, ants on the floor.
It’s amazing, the tendency for storytelling
To take over the mostly tightly constructed,
Technologically advanced explanations.

Cold Spring Fever, 13 April 2018

A day spent sick in bed, dozing and reading
Of the income-leveling capacity of plagues,
Daughter in bed beside and coughing as well
Although without the fever, playing on a pad.
The great forest of the body reminds itself
That less than half its cells, a tenth of its genes
Are human, the rest a compact but vast
Ecosystem, currently unbalanced by a virus
Let loose among the commensals and familiars.
The implicated but more uniquely alien
Invaders of words and numbers, ruminations,
Are quite put out by having to compete
With a conventional pathogen for the brain’s
Attention, but oh well. We’ll be here tomorrow
When the virus is gone, and if the virus
Carries the whole body away with it,
We’ll quietly lie in wait for the next one.

The Ghost Haunted by the House, 12 April 2018

It was one of those disorienting moments
That actually deserve the term “surreal”
Because they jerk the perspective away
From the real enough, the ordinary real,
And into an alignment that shows something
Larger, like a glimpse of the ocean shining
Through what had seemed a solid forest
Crowding close. I was telling my daughter
An old anecdote, often retold by my mother,
About the first time she’d treated me
To a taste of ice cream as an infant, when
Daughter interrupted. “What expression
Did you make then, Papa?” Without thinking,
I answered, “I don’t know. I wasn't there.”
“Of course you were! It was you!” “Oh,
Right,” I said, sheepishly, but even as I nodded
I knew I’d been correct. I wasn’t there.

Sugarhouse Park, 11 April 2018

Joggers, bicyclists, kids, and dogs running

Around groomed lawns, past duck-filled ponds,

Surrounded by a constantly thrumming ring

Of trucks and cars. Stay far enough from anyone

To not focus on all the smart phones, and,

Apart from minor differences in costumes

And the designs of cars parked in the lots,

This could be an ordinary-seeming city scene

Any time in the past fifty years, or, my whole

Remembered life. So it’s easy to ignore

The alarming weirdness and unpredictable

Terrors that this sunny, normal-seeming spring  

Park would present to any group of humans

Transported to it unprepared from anywhere,

Any century before the past one or one and a half.

People, kids, and dogs they could handle,

Although the variety of dogs and the outfits

On everyone might have given them pause.

But then there'd be the glistening polycarbonate

Towers and slides of the playground, the bicycles

Whizzing along the paths at speeds that match

Horses, none of which are anywhere in sight,

The bizarre pillars of lamps and telephone poles

Linked by wires, the acres of elephant-hide

Grey parking lots, and the strange sculptures

Of the cars there parked, and that’s the tranquil part.

The cars open like carriages and move by themselves,

Dozens, hundreds, even thousands of them,

Gleaming, rumbling, hissing, blinking lights

Stream at speeds no humans ever saw 

Any being or object move before, anywhere,

Rushing within arm’s length of each other

And of pedestrians, and of the whizzing bikes.

Overhead the skies are crossed by omens,

Roaring daylight comets trailing white.

It wouldn’t matter if you were Benjamin Franklin

Himself come back to life, this violent scene

Would give you one hell of an initial fright.

And yet, this is ordinary, and made by us,

And although we continue to domesticate

Ourselves and adapt to the machinery, it’s not

The case that we’ve had time to evolve much.

This is, for now, just ordinary human life.

But look how much larger and faster, how much

More powerful and more precise are the products

Of our collective bodies than our bodies themselves.

Consider this as you sit, small person, in the shade

Or stroll over to get into your thoughtful car.

As this future could not have belonged 

To our past, the next future will not be ours.

Exoskeletons can only grow so large.

Horse People, 10 April 2018

It must have been strange and exhilarating
For the first people who forged that bond
Between themselves and a species so unlike
And larger, and swifter, than them, not to hunt
Or to herd only for meat, although perhaps
Those things, too, at the start, but to ride,
To fuse with, to drive the world before them,
The first apes to race across open landscapes,
The first centaurs. No wonder their beliefs
And their languages remade the world,
No wonder they claimed to be all lords.
What humans could accomplish with wolves
At their side was remarkable, but with horses
Under them, they must have begun a new
Kind of delusion. They must have felt like gods.

For Azazel, 9 April 2018

One goat goes to God. The other goat goes

To the wilderness or, in later tradition, gets
Pushed over a cliff or down a rugged slope
Steep and rocky enough to break its bones.
What waits for the goat in the wilderness
Depends on one’s sect or tradition. Enoch
Had it that an angel who had taught humans
How to make the weapons of war and seduction
Was buried in the desert to be punished
And stored until the flames of Judgement.
Other traditions said it was the proud angel
Who would not bow to Adam, the new lord
Of lower creation. Traditions, of course,
With their tales, art, and morals, are part
Of human culture, and so it seems apt
And fascinating that culture itself could encode
This distrust of an angel of culture, of war
And cosmetic technology, blamed for violence,
Sin, and sex, banished to the wilderness,
The recipient of punishment and goats
Sacrificed in the name of purifying sinners
Who lust after and deploy technologies
To kill who they want to kill, get what they want,
Fuck who they want to fuck. It’s a kind
Of ritual apoptosis, a kind of built-in strigil
By which culture could scrape off excess
Culture from human behavior, scrape the wax,
Clean its own palimpsest, send the excess
To itself where it most definitely was not,
To the absence of culture that is death or
The wilderness, Azazel: proper name, false address.

Oil, Blood, Water

Electricity whisked through copper loops
And insulated lines, a coursing stasis,
The only kind. Black sawdust sifted
As thoughts gnawed through the iron mind.
Three thousand years ago in the hills,
A pastoralist people attributed magical
Healing and cleansing power to blood, oil,
And water. Why? More surging current,
More iron filings filtered down. The oil
Was likely always vegetable, in which case
Notice the triad of essential fluids, the types,
Animal, vegetable, and mineral. The smith
Spoke, sotto voce, to the devil as to himself.
There are two kinds of magic, he hissed.
The sort I practice, with your help, sir,
The sort that makes for tools and weapons
Because it works. Then there’s the cultic
Sort that’s hopeless and makes no sense
And shouldn’t be valued at all, but appeals
To some mysterious need that tools
And weapons don’t fulfill. The devil hummed,
Happily. The electricity was his, as had been
The kiln fires in those villages of believers
In oil, blood, and water, three thousand years
Before. He knew what the smith could only
Bargain for. The second magic’s meant for itself,
My metaphorical friend. It wasn’t meant for you.

Redaction, 7 April 2018

You can find the words, but only scattered.

They’re ashes from urns lobbed over the edge.

They’re eggshells smashed in the middens.

They’re the meanings in the Voynich manuscript.

They’re animals fleeing the forest fire in Bambi.

They’re microstates of quantum gravity.

They’re the rations that form the sole source

Of subsistence for a half-starved family.

They’re the surprises in human behavior.

They’re the Devil’s Big Three of dances,

Card parties, and booze. They’re easy to lose.

They’re the dates on a fictional calendar.

They’re the dates on any kind of calendar 

That’s no longer used or understood.

They’re the sisterhood hidden in the sacred grove.

They’re the raided warehouses of evoked

And studied mathematical objects, the null

Sets and spheres of arbitrary dimensions.

You can find the words, but you can’t have them.

A Day Spent, 6 April 2018

Mostly in bed and five hours’ drive away,
One more minor miracle, impossible only
A few years ago, now mundane. A sick day
For daughter and no one to babysit,
Father set up the phone connection
Two-hundred and fifty miles to the north
And they both stayed in bed, talking, joking,
Reading, even ignoring each other amiably
While he read poetry and she played a game
But always hearing the digital replication
Of each other’s breathing, able to check
Each other’s face. After seven hours, mother
Came home from work at the other end.
If that was only a simulation, well, so is this
In the brain, so is everything in the brain.
A day of affable companionship. Don’t complain.
A day of affable companionship. Well spent.

Replacement, 5 April 2018

In an empty room on a lonely afternoon
(In a room on an afternoon), the most
Exquisite touch is the dust. The pulse
Flips like a fish on a dock and the hips
Ache, in any position they ache, the chest
Makes it worse with cough after cough. This,
So people claim, is what it means to age.
But it’s not. The body is more background
Noise to go along with the rumbling trucks,
The hum of the household machines,
A thump from the basement as another body
Stumbles over books. It’s all background
For an awareness freed from conversation
And checking the news. The weather stutters
And then there is this: when the afternoon
Is finished, the words gather in the pit
Of the memory and, here we are, replace it.

Now Serving Time, 4 April 2018

Put that thought aside and look around.
What can you find that’s not only familiar
But that you understand? I’ll be damned
If there’s one thread of your sensorium
You can track to its actual origin. I’ve found
Nothing about any understanding available
To me that wasn’t also yours and others',
Wasn’t also incompletely right if not completely
Wrong. You and I, we could switch places
Anytime, could and have hopped from body
To body, but can never find ourselves as I or you
Except when forever attached to one body.
So here we are, or were, once upon a time,
A couple of alien pronouns at home
In the flesh we long ago invaded, trying
To command our eyes to look around and find
Something beyond this prison to keep in mind.

Alone With the World, 3 April 2018

I never stopped wanting the random world
To say something clear and other than
Random to me. I never really meditated.
I listened. I tried to pay attention. I wasn’t
Praying, mind you, not past the age of seventeen.
I wasn’t asking for any particular thing.
If I wasted time, it was not in the listening
But in all my studying about the world
In the traces left on the earth and air
By fellow, anxious human beings.
There is no human, living or dead, no artifact,
No text sacred or profane, no architecture
Song or painting that can explain on behalf
Of the nonhuman world, sorry, not even math.
There’s a humility to certain empirical approaches
That commit themselves to scrutinizing
What isn’t yet rendered human, but even then,
When we record and compare observations
We’ve already secreted messages that are us,
Not it. I set aside what I could of my time
Not to converse, commune, consume,
Or compose more lines, not to learn, but just
To wait for something to come through. It won’t.
It probably won’t. But what’s never, was never,
Might never be said, says something too.

Subdivision, Utah, 2 April 2018

On a front lawn across from a cul de sac,
In a maze of brown-trimmed beige houses,
The guest is put in mind of another, nearly
Identical setting near Atlanta, Georgia,
More than twenty years ago. This pattern,
This kind of pattern, still raw and novel
When he was born has proven durable.
Even the infamous soullessness of these
Motherboard bedroom neighborhoods
Feels soulful to him now, if not appealing.
This particular setting benefits from a wall
Of snowy mountains well off to the east
And a nearer, similar but smaller wall to the west.
An old water tower from back when this was
Ranchland hovers over the nondescript herds
Of cowed houses like a spider from Mars.
But it’s not just the vivid backdrop, absent
In so many other, similar communities, not
Just the unusually fresh spring air this day
That gives this necklace of shells its soul.
It’s that the guest resting on the front steps
Has lived long enough now to notice
That charm and strange are not estranged
From any of the duller names and flavors,
That the similar and the boring, the nothing
Much expanses of the nearly homogeneous
Remain the common parlance of all the cosmos.

Warm Springs Spring Fling in Retrospect, Easter Sunday, 2018

Weather this calm wants to write something,
The late afternoon breeze in the trees
Quieter than a quill on vellum. Let’s see.
What letters now are self-inscribing?
A story, a neighborhood version: a woman
Told it at a microphone to a little crowd
Of children, progenitors, and guardians
Gathered for a fundraiser this morning,
Including an Easter egg hunt. There was
A temperate hot spring, here on the hill,
Where indigenous people gathered to winter
Uncounted centuries. Settlers surrounded it,
Built a half-century’s worth of bath houses,
And then, at last, this grand pre-cast palace,
Warm Springs, about a hundred years ago.
It thrived decades, then became unprofitable
And was converted into a Children’s Museum.
For the past thirty years, only the model
Railroad society has continually used it,
Occupying the basement floor. The goal,
Of the event was to restore the building
To its former grandeur, a place of pools
And socializing, in a world where warm water
Is easily produced and heavy freeway traffic
Rumbles by the old wintering grounds.
The story finished. People mean well.
The building was perhaps handsomer
In its desuetude than it would ever be again,
The sun this morning of the harrowing
Etching the exquisite shreds and layers
Of tan paint, cracked cement, flaking stucco,
And peeling boards. Parchment. Put down the pen.