Occultural Evolution in Saint George, Utah, Halloween, 2018

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

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

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

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

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

Neither stay forever nor ever leave.

Lake of the Cosmos, 30 October 2018

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Systematic semaphores
Signaling nothing.
We had fun today.

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

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

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

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

Imperturbable, Saint George, Utah, 26 October 2018

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

The Cultural Evolution Society, Tempe, Arizona, Day Three

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

The Cultural Evolution Society, Tempe, Arizona, Day Two

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

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

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

Conventions and Rituals, Tempe, Arizona, 22 October 2018

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

Thatcher, Arizona, 21 October 2018

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

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

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

Clear Air, Saint George, Utah, 19 October 2018

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

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

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

Glossophoria, Utah, 17 October 2018

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

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

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

Tranquility, Nevada, 15 October 2018

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

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

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

Jump Rope in Snow, Cedar Breaks, 13 October 2018

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

Holly Bibble, Brian Head, 12 October 2018

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

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

“For relatively unspecialized parasites, 

General strategies such as prudent behavior

Can be equally effective as more specialized

Deception.” Some nights, before sleep,

Hoping to remain undetected in my tiny nest,

I suspect our entire planet of being only

A cautious parasite on the sun that just set.

Trace it backwards, every last step, every

Last track, every last trace of complexity

Left by life’s thermodynamic cascade. What

Have we left? A star’s expenditure of flame

As gravity beckons it on towards nothing,

Continually nibbled at by Earth’s every vortex. 

Uncounted discreet little mouths never rest.

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

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

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

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

None, One, Plural, Utah, 8 October 2018

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

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

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

Ancestry Far From Utah, 6 October 2018

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

Winderland, Utah, 5 October 2018

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

Infinite Fracture, Saint George, Utah, 4 October 2018

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

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

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

Mourning Doves and Magpies Near Park City, Utah, 2 October 2018

But he turned his face to the wilderness
When the rains returned and the colors washed
Out of the branches. He saw the wild birds
On the edge of town, domesticating
Themselves for success at reproduction,
As his own ancestors had done. And now,
Look how things had become, every human
Head stuffed with the weight of the world of words.
Civilization itself was the rough
Beast come round to gobble up everyone.
As it was possible that the termites
And their wonderfully complicated mounds
Were servants of the fungus they tended
And fed from, the secret of their success,
Our bodies and minds, even the feral
Haunting the margins, were made the servants
Of the hovering bolus of culture
That fed us. But he turned his face away
From the obvious to the wilderness.

What Can I Doom That This World Has Not Doomed? Park City, Utah, 1 October 2018

The story carries me and all the other, littler

Stories I carry around inside me inside it.

Do you know the story of Balaam and Balak?

One was a technician, to begin with,

Of the polytheistic, superstitious sacred.

The latter was a king of Moab who bought in

To the ancient notion that a technician could

Help him. But the Lord of one encampment 

Thwarted him. The Lord got hold of Balaam.

Lots of jokes about an ass. Lots of tricks

For an audience of committed monotheists.

But the story contained its own self-destruct

Command in its satirical skepticism. Look,

God mocks the superstitions of pagans

And idols and con-artist magic men shamans.

Mockery based on evidence, however,

“You can’t do the things you say you can,”

Is universal acid. If the daimon doesn’t

Appear to the ass and Balaam, if Balaam is

No better than the pagan technician he was

Once your omnipotent God converted him,

Then what are we left with, ahem? Atheism

(And skepticism of superstitions, generally)

Was birthed with monotheism, with savaging

And laughing at the impotence of deities. Fin.