Veyo, Utah, 31 August 2018

Every portrait’s a portrait
Of a self, although
Some are of selves other than
The portraitist’s own.

Even a flyspeck of town
Perched on lava-heaved rangeland
Above a Mormon desert,
Was a self to that poet.

The question of how gifted
A poet he really was
Had always been between him,
The ground, and the sky.

Sometimes he fell to the ground.
From there, he fell through the sky.

White Horse Cabin, Kolob Reservoir, 30 August 2018

Tonight I should dream, I should be dreaming
Of the red cabin with the bleached white
Plastic rockinghorse out front in the aspens,
A ghost in the ghosts of the aspens. I should
Imagine I am no longer outside and passing
But inside and waiting for, for, for what I’m not
Sure. Tonight, when it’s still night, when it’s
Almost still, night of the small hours, the clock
Hours absurdly claiming morning, I should
Wait inside the red cabin for the white horse
To free itself from its existence as molded
Plastic on a rusted rocking frame, to canter
And rear, to become the pale woman with ribs
I can get my hopes around, with dark hair.
What I won’t know tonight unless it’s true
That I woke from the dream and didn’t dream
I woke from it, was whether what I dreamed I knew.
Whatever I dream or wake from dreaming, tomorrow
The horse and the cabin will still be in the woods.

Dragonflies and Hummingbirds, Saint George, Utah, 29 August 2018

Dragonflies and hummingbirds occasionally
Ascended to my sixth floor balcony, inquisitively,
Humming, “half the poems I compose now
Are ghosts. I’m so haunted, if I were a house,
I’d be hosting guided tours for the credulous.”
No, really, you must believe me. That’s what
Their wings sang, making their little cuts,
Their myriad little cuts to suspend themselves
And rise through the dusty, sultry air. Oh well,
You don’t believe me. You wouldn’t. My license
For poetry has expired. There’s no sense
In indulging a fantasist who crouched nightly
On his high balcony, waiting for sprightly
Visitors he could pretend were ghosts or angels
Come to visit him, colorful as tinkling bells.

My Favorite Path into the Woods, Pine Valley, Utah, 28 August 2018

There are no objects,
Only standing waves
More or less swiftly
Disrupted by change
In the other waves
That made the current
That created them.

The path past the creek
Starts where the pavement
Ends, at least for now.
Sunlight seeks it out,
Moonlight too, some nights.
It’s quiet. It’s sweet.
And it vanishes.

Sturgeon Moon Surfacing Over Saint George, Utah, 27 August 2018

Notice how we use the future tense mostly
For planning and coordinating? It’s an odd
Gambit, given how hesitant we are to commit
To exact prophecies other than astronomical.
Or maybe it isn’t. Planning starts in astronomy,
And we’re only committing ourselves to plans
That coordinate with proven patterns
Of sun, moon, and stars. But prophecy means
Committing events beyond our control
And outside of familiar periodicities to occur
When we say they will. That’s riskier, and risk
Obsesses humans, as rarely as mostly of us
Master it, even the least bit. But what the hell.
The sturgeon moon slewed around through full
On schedule. By now it will already be slightly
Diminished. The planets will shine when we expected
Them to shine, for those who are up in the small
Hours to watch and for those who are not.
And all sorts of unforeseen little twists will happen
That will change the fates of all lives, all moons,
And all planets, but we won’t recognize them,
Not even by this morning’s sunrise, will we?

Poor Beast, Saint George, Utah, 26 August 2018

Sometimes, from a precarious perch for frail
Bones, a human might survey the torn skin
Of the world, great beast of a world to tiny
Humans but minuscule pebble in the ocean
Of all nights, and think, pathetically, naturally,
Perhaps the great poor beast on which we
Ride all our picayune days itself is suffering.
Suffering from us, yes, alright, yes, but more
Poignantly, suffering for us, its sad children
So mad with happiness and anger and glee.
A human might not signify except to other
Humans, the signifying monkeys one and all,
But still the dumb beast below us, spinning
Ever so slightly more slowly each turn, might
Groan below the gaudy clouds, might hurt.

Three A.M. Snapshots, Saint George, Utah, 25 August 2018

You might experience this moment
As continuous. You might wake up at three
In the morning of the day in question
And read a seamlessly unscrolling darkness
Spangled with all the well-fueled little lights
Above and below and beyond as one
Hendiadys. But it won’t be, it wasn’t, it
Never is. Attention is too precious to spend
On continuity. The mind needs to jump
Between states of awareness to have any
Hope of sampling enough incoming
Universe to persist. If you weren’t so
Distractable, you’d much more quickly cease
To exist. Blink freely and allow your neck
To twist. The world a winking window is.

A Brand New Day, Saint George, Utah, 24 August 2018

Something will happen, some things will
Occur, and day will come in the middle
Of the night, the hour of the beginning
For clocks and a great many offspring.
Something will happen, and this will be
Yesterday, this which is already always
The past, even today. Some things will
Occur to turn the pale blue dot caught
In the slingshot embrace of a humble star,
And some things will say that this is new,
This is a brand new day. Why? Because
Other things, including a great many beings,
Awfully graciously, by then will have gone away.

Dream State University, Utah, 23 August 2018

Rihaku’s speedy clocks unwound
Towards the end of the lonely
Night, although no one could agree,
Who caught its cold, whether it was
Short, as Rihaku claimed it was,
Or longer than the average year.
Every university has
Its blithe and lovestruck, sick and charmed,
Lecherous, book-worshipping, or
Simply dumb and dumbstruck students.
Not every university
Has its Rihaku, the mythic,
Monstrous threat to everyone else
Who’s really just a small, old man
Who catches cold like anyone
And whose greatest achievement was
To speed the young before the dawn
Into one another’s arms, just
Because their youth unwound his hours.

If We’re Lucky, We’ll See Rain, Saint George, Utah, 22 August 2018

There’s a reasonable sense
In which now is the future,
Because we’re not quick enough
To ever experience
Now exactly, processing
The incoming as we do,
Just a beat or two behind.
Of course, that’s not what we mean
When we discuss the future,
Except, in a way, when talk
And thought turns to deja vu
Or that sense that we just knew
The phone was about to ring.
Then we note the echoing
Of now caught inside just then.
Mostly though, we imagine
The future as further out
Than mere anticipation,
As when I sat on the porch
Observing eastern lightning
In the dry mountains, thinking,
Tomorrow could bring a storm.

Angels Reading Poetry in the Megaplex Before the Movie, Saint George, Utah, 21 August 2018

Good created humans as we know us.

Once our ancestors had the goods, they could
Be the ancestors of something like us.

Humans are not, of course, good, but each one
Has been made in the image of the good,
And most manage a pretty good likeness.

Not all, though. There are the sociopaths,
Who don’t know good, and there are the righteous
Who have learned that the only permission

We have for being bad is being good.
One poem was about a snake without bones,
Another about the divinity

Of change, another, a roundabout way,
About the most joyful haunts of angels.

Windy Urban Garden, Utah, 20 August 2018

To honestly pursue the truth wherever
We might find it requires the minimum initial
Admission that all truth-seekers are also
All liars. Until we can acknowledge that
Human universal, we are doomed to pass by,
At best, some truths in favor of others, which
We will then fight over passionately, claiming
Higher ground, allegiance with angels, sciences,
And morality while treading the evergreen turf
Of speculation, facts, mysteries, and discoveries
Into unholy mud. At worst, we’ll abandon any
Truth entirely in order to favor our favorite lies.
It’s an open question what truth and only truth
Would truly look like, or even if it exists, but
We’ll never see it without first admitting our need,
As social animals of language and gossip, to lie.

Side Road, Nevada, 19 August 2018

Did eras of extreme variance generate
Better odds for altruism-enhancing genes?
I hedged my bets. I had one daughter, and
Counted myself lucky in her. As for the rest,
I no longer cared that much. Haldane could
Jump in the lake to count on his hypotheses,
But I jumped in the lake only to save myself.
Here it was desert and daughter returned
To Zion for another fortnight, but I knew
How water worked, how the lights in the car
Wash burned all night, how the pick-ups
That showed up after dark still had enough
To rinse their dust, still had cold white light.
Riddle me your model. Life wins all our fights.

Pool, Saint George, 18 August 2018

For now there is play,
Frolics in filtered water,
Plenty of hot sun,
Plenty of machines
Driven by plenty
Of fossil fueled energy
To pump the water
Up and through, replenishing.
For hours at a stretch,
Evening and morning,
Body and daughter
Duck, splash, romp, and play.
Should the old body
Feel any remorse
At having arrived
At this merciful passage
Among the follies and pain?
Never. Rejoice and scamper
Through the glittering water
Since even creation reached,
Evening and morning, the end
Of those few creative days.
How soon everything invented
From nothing began
To fall prey to selection,
And much was taken away.
Let this light be benison.
Let the cancer come later.
Let these frolics be granted.
Let the lawyers come later.
We all know what they come for,
Zombies knocking on the door.
We know all the human games.
“What happens to the old when
They cannot cross the river?
Nothing. They remain behind.
Only the dog is puzzled.
The man accepts the nomad
Custom; he has come
To the end of his journey
And there is no place
At the end.” Amen.

Inherently a Coffee Shop, Hurricane, Utah, 17 August 2018

A visitor at the counter told the clerk
He was impressed at how their beer
Selection had been upgraded since
He was last in here. Aha, since when was I
Last in here myself? Since when did the last
Incoherent composition composed in here
Cohere? There’s nothing inherently interesting
About a menu with a few better beers
In a scenic sandwich shop in mostly Mormon
Southwest Utah. But there are ways of marking
The differences of days, as given, as when
I last was in here and no one was complimenting
The weaker beers, and the body in the corner
Was composing prefaces to his multivolume
End of life explanations. It didn’t end, and
Here we are, as bewitched by similarity as ever
But thankful there are now better beers, for it tells
Us that the spell was just a spell, that this is
Not the same, and that nothing inheres in here
After all, but change, but change, but change.

The Balcony at Twilight, Saint George, Utah, 16 August 2018

Hume was quite right to question causation,
Although he may not have gone far enough.
The myth of causation evolved from a bug
In culture caused, so to speak, by a feature
Of human psychology that helped lead
To culture through language technologies,
But of course that’s all nonsense. Thing was,
Humans, like all clever creatures, could track
Sequential correlations pretty closely: this
Kind of an event was often followed by this
Other kind of event. Reliable patterns made
Useful predictions, although our pattern
Detectors, like any lab rat’s, were sensitive
And, as we’ve more recently learned, easily
Tricked. So far, nothing special. But humans
Had another feature that evolved from our
Peculiar form of opportunistically inimical
And collaborative group-forming sociality.
Our ancestors’ core social technology,
And thus ours, was morality, was gossip, was
Guilt. The assignation of guilt required
The invention of responsibility, responsibility
Required causation. So that’s what we did.
We invented you did it. Now, a body can’t
Even sit on a balcony on a hot but peaceful
Desert evening high above suburban sprawl
Without wondering why that pizza delivery
Girl down there practices her Drake moves
While she waits by the waterfall for her tip,
Presumably presuming she’s unobserved?
A motorcyclist rumbling by gives her a wave.
A squad car pulls up and waits, but for what?
Eventually a tall man in shorts and white tee
Walks up to the squad car, and the officer gets
Out. They shake hands and then walk away
Down a bike path along a dry wash and vanish.
The pizza delivery girl dances back into her car.
Somebody walks a leashed and straining dog
Whose ancestors surely were wolves in the night.
Sirens rise and fall somewhere, just out of sight.
When you aren’t looking, the cop car drives away.
How did we get here? What who to credit blame?

Pine Valley Creek, Utah, 15 August 2018

First a buck in full velvet rack, one side, then
A doe twitching her white tail the other. Thunder
From over the sunny slopes of gambel oak,
Above the taller stands of ponderosas but
Under a pillar of cloud that dwarfed the slope,
Dwarfed the whole mountain. The creek,
Much reduced by summer and drought, still
Ran, still produced that constant running sound
Named variously babbling, chuckling, murmuring.
It had no personality, but it was pleasant, soothing.
No other humans. Only human trails, signs,
And fence rails. I had so much more to say,
But I decided to let it wait until another time.
The woods, however echoing of grace notes,
Were free of words just then. Why spoil them?

Rip van Winkle nodded off, just as the rain began.

Flail-yer, Saint George, Utah, 14 August 2018

What would it be like to experience the opposite
Of thought? Not no thought, mind you, not
Silence of the holy, Thich Nhat Hanh variety, but
The polar opposite of thought, unthinking it.
It would be hard to get there, I thought. I thought
Of daughter telling me she knew the words
She couldn’t say, and me thinking she had learned
What words were too taboo, when actually
She meant the words that challenged her too much
To pronounce because of their combinations
Of the English “luh” and “yuh” sounds in close
Proximity, the reason, for instance, that as a toddler
She pronounced yellow as lellow. She clarified
For me. When something doesn’t work right
I try to say the word, but I always say it was
A flail-yer. See? I know what I can’t say but
I can’t say what I can’t say. All I can do is show
You by saying it wrong until you get it. Flail-yer.
Ah, I thought. I can’t unthink what I’ve thought
Either, all I can do is think about how to tell you.

Perseid Squib, Saint George, Utah, 13 August 2018

Before dawn, a dusty haze and twinkling blankets
Of suburban stores and street lights washed
Out much hope of spotting shooting stars.
Given all the glittering baskets of brighter, moving
Lights often attended by their own devoted
Sounds, why do we even bother craning our necks
Or reading news reports about this or that
Annual mere meteor shower, those silent squibs
That rip the night? The sight of one jet blinking
Red and white, with a roar for a trailing tail,
Would have sent the ancient astronomers
Into paroxysms of fright. Emperors might
Have lost their lives. What is it then, in us,
Our brains lit up to insomnia nightly, our neurons
Withering like the needles of brilliant Christmas
Trees, loaded down with all that culture’s given us?
What is it that wants to gaze in perfect silence
At the stars? How addicting, almost necessary,
To think that there are invisible or rarely visible
Powers that care about us, individually, our cosmos
Lit like a candle chandelier with millions and millions
Of flaring, winking bright therapy angels. And when
One falls, we gasp and tell ourselves that speck
Of dust consumed meant something just for us,
Something out there we could trust, untouched.

Water Features, Saint George, Utah, 12 August 2018

Water levitated out of the rocks and faux rocks,
In front of the lobby and in back of the pool. Water
Features prominently in any serious desert effort
At conjuring a promise of earthly paradise,
Oases with gardens in them, miracles drawn
Out of sand, dust, and stone. The giveaway,
In this case, as in all, was in the way the water
Was channeled, fluffed, and constrained. It was
Wasteful, yes, but not generous. A small two-way
Waterfall out front, tumbling out of a fountain
At the top of a heap of red rocks, then pouring
Down either side, vanishing into the ground
To be pulled up again. And in the back, a barely
Disguised swimming pool filter, concrete painted
To look like a red rock outcrop, and another
Waterfall returning the filtered, treated water
To the pool. Observing these features, the swimmer
Considered how consistent the human method
For selling other humans back their dreams
At a profit, for an advantage in the constant
Exchange and bartering of resources. Look
Powerful, extravagant, even magical, but keep
Your resources in reserve. Show paradise,
But tightly control the rate it evaporates away.
Make it seem like the impossible is on offer,
The perfect combination, nothing but sunny
Weather and endless water to play with.
The swimmer remembered a wintry mountain town,
Its shopping mall court with hanging tropical gardens
While grey sleet moaned above the glowing stores.
The same. Wasteful, yes, but not generous.
That was possible. The swimmer had been
Both generous and wasteful, therefore profligate,
A great failing. But generosity without waste,
No, that had never been possible. Water
Features living and dying, coursing and falling,
Condensing, stagnating, evaporating. It follows
The rules that can be channeled, never broken.
It doesn’t feature miracles, save for holy fools.

Wind, Dust, Rain, Hail, Lightning, Thunder, Saint George, Utah, 11 August 2018

After all that, it felt as if no evening air had ever
Been as cool and comfortable, as mild, as all
Forgiving. A late picnic of beer, hummus,
Flatbread, cheese, and sliced apples on the balcony
Felt like an appropriate way to celebrate. The things
That were in our future called us on to them,
Coaxing us, knowing how skittish we were
About the inevitable surprise shocks and pains
Hidden in them, but knowing as well that, like wind,
Dust, rain, hail, lightning, thunder, beer, hummus,
Flatbread, cheese, and apples, we were drawn
Inevitably on toward them and our ends within
Them, whether we feared or rejoiced in them,
Whether we knew or not what meaning meant
For them or for us, given them.

Pet Store, Saint George, Utah, 10 August 2018

The rescued cat, Chloe, alone in a cage,
Confined in a comfortable, three-story cage
With something different on each floor,
Looked bored and alone but not entirely
Lonely to the father and daughter visiting
From their new residence on the sixth floor.

Legacy Ridge Window, Utah, 9 August 2018

Staring out into the spangled dark from behind
A shield of glass against the heat, while
The central air conditioning ran constantly
And the Earth spun through the tail of Perseids,
A man known for the detail of his memory
When it came to jotting down dates and numbers
Was coming to terms with the realization
That either he had just spotted something
Like a shooting star, a quick hitch in the program
Of the universe, a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it
Little glitch, or he was lost. For weeks he’d been
Repeating his change of address. He had distinct
Memories of discussing number six-oh-eight
With the property manager, of putting it into
A book order as the address where to send
The books, of texting a friend and a relative
Unit six-oh-eight. He had seen it in emails.
He was as sure of the trail of text and texts
He'd left as he was of anything. Then he arrived,
And they handed him the keys to six-one-eight.
He protested the mistake. There was another
Number on the lease, in the emails, etc.
But there wasn’t. Every six-oh-eight he knew
He’d seen or written or checked was six-one
Not six-oh. Even the texts he had sent,
The forwarding address he’d given. Either
Reality had changed retrospectively, or,
Almost as frighteningly, he had not only
Forgotten, not merely forgotten or made
A mistake, he had written the mistake
Retroactively over all his own memories.
The number he remembered putting down
And seeing everywhere was never there.
Had he caught a glimpse of the universe
Gaslighting him? Every thought was a riddle.
He watched through the window of six-one
As the desert night sulked. Six-oh. Had he detected
Something telling? Had he been infected
By his own peculiar variant of dementia?
How many strawberries grow in the salt sea?
How many ships sail through the forest?

Desert Palm Motel, Nevada, 8 August 2018

Not only do organisms make their nests
Within organisms. Not only do ecosystems
Nest within ecosystems. Whole kinds
Of ecosystems, systems of ecosystems nest
Within others. All of life, from, if not viruses,
Which may escape the definition, at least
Bacteria to oceanic systems of exchange,
The whole trophic cascade, serves as a host
Manipulated by the not-quite-living parasite
Of artifice, itself a vast system of behaviors
In many ways echoing the systems of life,
With its predators and prey, its furtive mice
Stealing crumbs from the pantries of the gods,
Its own parasites locked in population cycles
With its own hosts of seraphim and ghosts.
The swimmer traveling through the desert,
Found a cheap motel, the kind that once
Were new mushrooms springing up from
The droppings of the sudden car culture, now
Barely alive, their spores shed decades ago.
This one had a broken sign and a kind,
Anxious immigrant from India named Paul
(Come on, guess which part of India
That name suggests. Do you know?), who
Accepted cash and offered bottled water
From the mini-fridge in the motel office
That his wife had partitioned with curtains
To make a home. The heat outside insisted
Humans were not especially welcome, but
The room that smelled of a half-century or
More of cigarette smoke in the drapes
Nonetheless had a serviceable television,
A desperately wheezy air-conditioner, a tap
From which water sprang miraculously,
Electricity, lights, a shower head, a flush toilet,
Wifi, and a mini-fridge of its own. The dehydrated
Swimmer knew from all this that, despite the heat,
Despite the way the stars emerged as if, yes,
They were always there, those distant fires
Of this smoky sky, the way the broken sign
Drooped without regard for its fading
Significance, the ancients were correct
To boast of human triumphs over nature,
Even if the triumph itself had become leviathan
And even if, in this broiling desert, humans
Served only as hosts within their greater host.
All night he floated in the belly of the beast.

Exit 0, Monida, Montana, 7 August 2018

He stopped in at several small towns, but
All the inns were full. Monida had no inn. No
People either. Only ghosts like shacks, names,
And numbers. This time, he didn’t stop. But
He should have asked the ghosts. We would
Have told him that he had never stopped. Not
In Dillon, not in Dell, not in Lima, not atop
Any of the many, many continental divides,
Not even in Idaho Falls where he’d fallen
Years before on another trip searching
For a place to stop, not even when he found
Himself sitting on a balcony on a warm night
At last with a bed on which to lay his restless
Head, facing, of all things, a white, glowing
Mormon temple with its golden Moroni on it
Blowing that horn straight at his balcony,
Just as the Moroni of Salt Lake used to blow
His horn straight at the traveller’s own bedroom
Window, all those years ago. This is not
To deny these are personal details, of interest
Only to egos, angels, gods, and ghosts, and not
Something a reader should have to scratch
A head to understand. But look, whispers
Monida, north of temples, ruined exit zero,
Look. We pass and pass. There is no place.

Last Swim, Slocanada, 6 August 2018

The lake lay low. And lower. The heads
Of rocks reemerging at the surface,
From a distance, looked like ducks.
The shoreline had become a good part
Of the bay. The giant driftwood logs of May
Were grounded darlings until winter storms.
The swimmer scrutinized the motion dazzle
Of the sunset on the close-to-calm, a breeze
That riffled the still just enough to scatter
The golden light like diamonds, like diamonds
Made of gold, but briefer, better, truer pledges
Of love for a world that only knew love
As changes, as pledges of more to come.

Silverton Day Park, Slocanada, 5 August 2018

The ants appeared unusually frantic,
Wrinkling time around their entrance
In the gravelly grass above the stony beach.
A motorboat cut a bit too close to shore,
But otherwise, the slightly wrinkled lake
Was quiet. The only reason you think an odd,
Intense, or frightening event took longer,
Slowing down time is because you were
More attentive, more neuronally engaged,
Not because you could slow down events
Or react any faster. Your brain estimates
Duration based on how much attention
You paid. The swimmer tried to pay more
Attention to these last, high summer days
At the lake, but the ants were no less frantic
And the crows refused to slow their cawing.
So long memory wove its own wrinkles,
More comfortingly. The similarities of this
Day to hundreds of previous visits to swim
In the sun, snugged tightly together
In bunches, bundling the fabric of change
So that it all seemed almost one, and that
One almost unchanging. The swimmer stood
Up and wandered back into the waves.

Kaslo, British Columbia, Festival Weekend, 4 August 2018

Ah well, another day, I heard one woman say.
It was the Festval’s second, middle day. Who
Knows what people mean when they shrug
That way? They could be of the “it goes on”
Type, or maybe of the “it is what it is” type.
In any case, a day combines, any day, both
The proof of continuation, as in “here we still
Are, yet another day,” and the greater proof
Of change, as every day, no matter how
Familiar feeling, no matter how similar, is
Never actually the same as, never yesterday.
Which was it she felt more when she sighed?
The fact we can feel a bit of both is why we
Count the days. Another band got up to play.

One Universe Within Slocanada, 3 August 2018

The conundrum the cosmologist could not
Seem to grasp was that even absolute
Perfection, whether of God or wavefunction,
Could change, could attain more than one
Kind of absolute perfection. The reasoning
That something perfect was constrained
To be beyond time and therefore changeless
Was baseless. Time was not the whole
Of change: it was a category of change,
Periodic, cyclical, slow, that life, including,
Eventually, humans and human cultures,
Seized on as useful for winning more living,
For coordination, for competition. Cultures
Made time a technology, many technologies,
But those technologies were neither
Nonexistent nor eternal, nor externally actual
Except as used by the human technologists.
Time in math and physics was time as math.
If it dropped out of an equation, however
Mysterious and esoteric it was, very well,
It dropped out then. The cosmos went on
Changing. This was mysterious to the mystic
Cosmologist, furrowing his brow at his math.
The ancient philosophers must have been
Correct, he muttered. Time did not exist;
It was an illusion of confused humans cut
Off from goodness or God or perfection,
Humans therefore suffering. You had to
Hand it to a species so gifted at taking credit
And assigning blame for everything, first,
As an evolved survival strategy, a social skill,
But ultimately extending it to the most basic
Nonhuman features of their human, humble,
Circumscribed experiences, even if it meant
Reasoning their way to blaming themselves.
That must be the key, thought the cosmologist,
If someone were to observe timeless but
Entangled halves of a cosmos, observation
Alone would ensure people were being born
And dying. Eureka. The universe becomes
Alive! Alright, maybe, said one external god
To the cosmologist, if you want it that way.
But forgive me if I keep changing outside
Of your microcosmos where you pretend
To be measuring your dream of a timeless
Essence of me. My little friend, you are
The ground state in which you embed
Your dreams of a universal consciousness
That is forever and calm, to which you can,
By choosing to do something, say meditating
Silently for days at a time, hah, as it were,
For instance, return. You are the suffering
And the joy, but you cannot change things
To keep things from changing. You cannot
Create the unchanging, however complex
Your math, however intense your dreams.
The cosmologist feared losing motivation.

Or on a Distant Journey, Slocanada, 2 August 2018

Running into ger in the Tanakh, it occurred

To the swimmer that when T.S. Eliot, scion

Of Boston Brahmins, raised in St. Louis, later

Styled himself a metoikos, Greek for ger,

Someone never at home really, anywhere,

He wasn’t only indulging in self pity, he was

Inventing a kind of excuse, an excuse

The swimmer knew. To abide is to tent, is to

Dwell, but if even forty years of encampment 

In the same wilderness can be claimed 

A mere sojourn for the unnameable ruler

Of everything, then a few decades here or

There, a change of nation states, means

Nothing, really, no responsibility. The swimmer

Surveyed the lake, glowering peacefully in

The hazy sun between summer thunderstorms,

After a good, long swim. Home is where, when

You feel like ger, you still have to take it in.

One Corner of a Small House, Slocanada, 1 August 2018

Some days, even the Lord of Hosts could do
No better, some say, than dictate Leviticus
To priestly scribes. It seems not every divine
Utterance produces prophecies or psalms.
So who is a mere compositor fond of a swim
To try to be more consistent with his praise?
By afternoon the storms came out to play.
That meant the swimmer should not today.
In one corner of a small house he waited
As form constants and Turing patterns lit
A sky filled with rain and the random firing
Of internal background noise, internal
To the brain of God. Ah, see? As it strikes
And candles a conifer high on one ridge
Above the fluttering waves of the lake, it hits
You, too, you’ve thought more than once
Of the mind of God, but never of God’s
Brain. Why not? The swimmer bereft of safe
Swimming this hour will let you answer that
For yourself in your own brain. This is, after
All, his Leviticus, or perhaps his Numbers,
Obsessed with counting and observing
Cultic practices of a small tribe of chosen
Phrases. If you complain we make no sense
In whatever damnable world you inhabit,
We’re happy to proclaim you a heretic. See?
This is the primary feature of a system
Of belief: an activator and an inhibitor
Fighting against each other. Noise plays
A pivotal role. The thunder performs its part.
The higher brain becomes more excited.
There is at least, among the priestly writers,
A technology to deal with original impurity.
There is at least, among the neurons, wiring
That inhibits hallucinatory patterns. There is
At least, on an afternoon of storms and no
Swimming, an invisible but dangerous force,
The holiness its Leviticus ascribes to lakes.