Bossing Around a Rare Rainy Afternoon in Saint George, Utah, 30 November 2018

A small dog on a rhinestone leash spun
In circles whenever the dog’s walker tried
To compel its reluctant obedience. A woman,
Clearly sympathizing with the dog’s walker,
Said she thought the dog was a real handful,
As don’t we most. Inequality is the first rule
Of human rules, and all of rules are human.

A Day Before the First Serious Snows Came to Pine Valley, Utah, 29 November 2018

Information about the past is the past.
The past is information. It can be read
To make more past, more information,
Or it can be left, latent, forgotten until
It disintegrates and is lost. Not the past
Anymore, just more of what never was
Because now it truly isn’t. I knew a post-doc
Once, a taphonomist who dissected
And dated pack-rat middens to reconstruct
Climate history. She had to apply information
To get information, but in those ugly tangles
Of desiccated debris, radiocarbon dated,
She could pull out seeds and pollen to see
What grew, how wet or dry were the seasons,
How little lives shifted through centuries.
Nothing much humbler than old rat middens,
But behold the past elaborated within them!
Enough to envision whole swaths of ecosystems.
A triple ecosystem myself, body composed
Of trillions of microscopic clones hosting
Trillions more of even tinier prokaryotic beasts,
All in turn environment for a mind haunted
By competitive patterns of inherited words,
I, and we, watched daughter’s caged gerbils
Industriously digging through fresh bedding,
Digging tunnels, heaping nests, gnawing
Sticks to papery shreds, rearranging caches.
Occasionally one would dig down to a corner,
Hit glass, but for a while continue digging,
Scrabbling futilely, paws a weird whispering.
I, also we, looked up from where we tapped
At a glass screen of whispering, industrious
Us composing new pasts from old sticks
And fresh bedding. Ah, all so busy, busy,
Ahead of the storms, heaping up middens.

Painted Pony, Saint George, Utah, 28 November 2018

We are only words within a work of ruinous
Ambition, a long, uncoiling, segmented,
Circular, echoing hymn of disaster, at times
Attaining actual profundity of thought, style,
But lapsing, time and again, into sentiment,
Bathos, outright silliness. Thus, a life,
A journal in perpetual metamorphosis,
A lyric assemblage, blue bower of the bird
Compelled to assemble it from anything
Not nailed down, portable, the right color,
The stolen, uneven commonplace book
Of the metaphorical liar, an argument
Of appreciation that every thing you wrote
Was true of that is equally true of this, of us.
We came from somewhere else, long ago.
By now, perhaps, we rule another world. By now,
Perhaps, no beast remains who can speak us.
We form an existence, nonetheless, however listless.
Phrase by phrase, we lay us down, now beastless.

A Parasite Vastly Larger Than Its Hosts, 27 November 2018

Body, growing lighter daily, sat heavily
Down in a broken-bottomed wicker chair
As if daring it to collapse, as if on a dare.
The world was coining new worlds daily
And body dangled off one twiggy end
Of the globe’s collective brain. The brain
Wanted to claim it was cloning not coining,
Was charming, not cloning. Body wanted
To wander around in it, to argue with it, only
If, if only, body could win. The branching
Forest of symbols, glowing with its own light
But shading out the sun and filtering stars,
Was gathering body in, a moldering fruit
That could never have managed original sin.

Thunder Mountain, Saint George, Utah, 26 November 2018

A pretend volcano with a pretend pterosaur
Belched pretend rumblings and fumes, rivers
Of red Christmas lights for lava, over the children’s
Playground of triceratops-shaped slides, dancing
Fountains from the painted cement T-Rex.
One entrance to the play park went through the real
Cemetery beside it, with many stone benches
For contemplation encircling the plotted graves.
Actual lava littered the ground, revenants of flows
That poured over sandstones containing evidence
Of actual dinosaurs, of other species, tracks
And bones. The most strenuous imagination
Echoed, faintly, the presently remaining past.
Leaving past the tombstones, daughter happy
And fresh-faced after two hours play in the park
Asked from the back where body should like
To be buried, while specifying that her father,
Old already, live better, live long enough to allow
Her a long life herself with him always in it.
Body laughed, faintly echoing the remaining past.

Partially, 25 November 2018

Cinderella met a man in a hole. Even in a field
Of plenty, an absence is something to behold.
There is something that I need to tell you,
Something that has never been told: tell,
In the Indo-European language family, has
Its origins in counting, in enumeration. Stories
Are recounted. But epic, in the same family,
Has its roots in song. To number or to sing,
To counter or to celebrate, half of the whole thing.

Quail Creek Reservoir, 24 November 2018

Here’s a falsifiable hypothesis: the same
Beast who starts out gloomiest before dawn
And gets progressively more upbeat until
Evening, nearly each and every day, composes
Brighter, more cheerful verses in the mornings
Than in the evenings or past midnight, when
Most of the beast’s compositions get done.
How is this falsifiable? Let’s take as a given
The well-established pattern of mood change
Throughout the typical day, certainly for this
Beast but probably common to many, maybe
Most of the species. Analyses of moods
On social media show much the same trend.
Then, giving that we have a set of thousands
Of texts composed by the same beast over
Several years, at all hours of the day, but
Primarily at night, we can retrospectively
Test our paradoxical hypothesis analytically.
And? The analysis refutes the null. Verses
Composed earlier in the daylight hours
Are significantly more likely to be cheerful,
Even silly, even absurdly pointless, just as this
Composition, overlooking gold cottonwood
And willow around the shining reservoir
In the midst of black lava, red and buff sandstone,
Under a stippled sky on a quiet morning, is.

Mirrors Are Not Much Fun Anymore, Not Since Fifty-Four, Utah, 23 November 2018

“lorde i am 1 / lorde i am 2 / lorde i am infinate” ~jos charles 

Gored, we are non-finite. Torn, we are you.

Forlorn, we are one. As you were. I am, too.

Bored, we am playful. Doing chores, we are

Infantle. Just a little. Me, you would be two.

The I is a window, true, one hole. The window

Is an eye with a soul. The whole is a lie, long

Ago. Cis trans gloria truly. Heart full of bowls,

Bowled over, we bowl them. Who patrols

The true boundaries of the games’ rules

Refuses to control hymns, is not her him.

We are many but most one when we legion.

We have heard many hard hearts pledge allegiance. 

We are litters littering, literally, regions’ religions.

We are our own fissioning secrets, egregious.

We want you to reflect on your own sequence.

They Turned First to the Opossum, North America, 22 November 2018

We want a word with you. For history shows us

That faith is frailer than knowledge. To wit:

When zealous Christians forced conversions,

Smashed the ancient temples, outlawed 

Any faith but their own, hunted philosophers,

And burned most of the books, they killed

Faith in the gods and cults completely, but,

Despite only tiny shreds of texts remaining,

They never forgot those philosophers and gods,

They only obliterated belief in them. When

The first Dalai Lama was appointed in Tibet

To legitimize a khan’s empire with the iron rule

Of Buddhism, the shamans of the Black Faith

Were hounded to extinction, and yet Tibetan

Buddhist monasteries and their polychromatic 

Imagery never forgot those lurid gods and ogres.

Knowledge is not power, not exactly. It’s useful,

Yes, and usually worth keeping, but belief

Is the actual locus and instrument of dominion.

Knowledge is, at its scariest, only the display

Of faith’s instruments of terror, territio realis.

To capture faith is to wield control over knowledge,

But a faith is never valuable forever. A faith

Is a species, competing and battling extinction.

Knowledge is every cache and strategy faith

Might seek to take from others and hoard for itself.

There is no rule that predicts all species, save

That they all go extinct in the end. Ways of being

Prove more archaic and durable among them.

Beforehand, Saint George, Utah, 21 November 2018

No matter how nostalgic, how belated, how
Mournful you feel, you are in the beforehand,
Always. If you aren’t, then you aren’t, but
If you aren’t, you can’t care. If you are, if you
Are at all, the least little bit remaining of you,
You remain in the beforehand. Something is
Coming next and you are what has been,
As you are anything. It’s coming. Could be
Startling; could be boring as sin. But it’s coming.
And here you are, reading this, beforehand.

The Disappearance of Useful Arts, Saint George, Utah, 20 November 2018

Only happened when something happened
To shred the population, the collective brain.
This here population was still booming, and,
More importantly, was getting more multiply
Interconnected by the day, by the hour. But,
Complex, interconnected civilizations had had
Their shocks and collapses before, you know.
Any society ever was was at risk of collective
Dementia. Our crazy-wired mammalian brains
Long ago began to function, thanks to words,
As individual neurons generating, not merely
Consciousness, their awareness as animals,
But the self-consciousness language made:
The mind. We were all plugged into the matrix
Tens of thousands of years before we imagined
Such a thing together. We were chimeras
Of stories and patterns on the walls of caves,
Petroglyphs chipped into cliffs. We were myths.
Despite mind’s occasional losses, a lot, a lot
Of useful arts had been acquired since then.
Mind might have imagined it as something like
Apocalypse, end of all things, were we to fall
Backwards all at once, all together, shredded
Into thin ribbons, isolated strips and bits
Of tiny villages and wandering bands again. But.
Could that happen? Only if there were truly
None of us left. Otherwise? Mind the resurrection.

Valley of Fire, Nevada, 19 November 2018

Two and a half hours’ drive away in Zion,

The extended family was struggling 

To come to terms with an anachronistic,

Absurdly so, celebration of freak shows.

This being the third millennium, albeit

Very early in it, their struggle found its way

Through the relay waves as text messages,

Somehow leapfrogging the desert, arriving

Even among the crazed contortions of these

Sandstone freaks of nature being used

As exclamatory backdrops for the selfie lives

Of tourists congregating from near and far,

Far including at least four continents. Who

Has enough assertoric force to explain

To those who are not sports of nature

How we are all nature’s sports, down 

To the monstrous wee giants of protists,

Hemimastigophora, Hemimastix kukwesjijk,

Stupid hairy ogres with many organelles

And flagella, sucking out cytoplasm of prey?

How did micro-predators from Nova Scotia,

Classified within a new supra-kingdom

Of eukaryotes and christened in honor

Of a Mi’kmaq myth, the kukwes, come to be

In this composition? The same way family

Texts freaking out about the mistreatment 

Of freaks (who knew, right?) reached this.

Code coming over the air into nowhere, into

Where the gentleman at the picnic bench

By Lonesome Rock sat reading phrases

Off a glowing screen, kukwesjijk of a kind

Himself, hairy ogre, little freak, silly name.

This is no longer an instance of what this displays.

Song of Themselves, Saint George, Utah, 18 November 2018

If “the termite is a delivery vehicle
For the contents of its guts,” then I am
A delivery vehicle for the contents of my
Thoughts. My stories are alive and real,
But I’m just a shuddering husk housing them
For a while, a way to generate more text
For the Library of Babel, which was a way
Text generated itself via a husk it named
Borges. On and on. They can’t thrive without
Us and we can’t can’t thrive without them,
But I’ll bet when you saw that you weren’t
Certain whether them or us were speaking
To you, the industrious songs or the husk,
You, the industrious songs of the husk.

Suo Motu, Saint George, Utah, 17 November 2018

It goes by itself, a kind of radiance, perhaps,
A kind of darkness, if that’s what makes you
Laugh. It goes through you, it goes you, it is
You. You don’t do anything that goes it. You
Go with it, whether you hug the going tightly
To your bosom or just admit, “to hell with it.”
It’s incredible to you, in those moments you
Radiate with wavelengths you’ll never, no,
Never, as you perceive, seeing it as all going
At all, with you or without you, with you and
Without you. Oh god, heavens! How the dark
Heavens fill with their burning, their blinding
Lights. Suo motu. I’ll be up all night, tonight.

Bright Wood, Utah, 16 November 2018

The branches were all but emptied of leaves,
The air was all but bare of phrases. A few
Words hung on like lingering motes in the light.
They weren’t shy; they weren’t worn out.
They were all that was there. Creek talk,
Beige oak leaf carpet, branch tangles,
And something strange, an occasional
Thump or rumble, up from the ground, not
Thunder, not the rifle crack of a hunter,
Not the pound of deer hooves running.
A muted but definite bass drum of a bump,
A bump that could be felt as well as heard,
Several of them, from some distance south,
A puzzle. Detonations, maybe? Construction?
The beginning of the end signaled by bombs,
Distant bombs? Then not again. Sun sunk.
Creek talk continued unaltered alterations.
The air was all but bare of phrases as the light
Of the afternoon left the area. No clouds,
No thunder, no bumps, no beasts, no wonder.

Riding With Odysseus Past Pipe Springs, Arizona, 15 November 2018

Last I seen him, he was barreling across
The Arizona strip, rolling by Vermilion Cliffs,
Hayduke style, an open beer in hand, the rest
Of the six-pack seated beside him, ready
To chuck his first can out the passenger side,
Soon as it was done and he could catch
An empty mile. He didn’t seem the type,
But when I’d told him that, he’d just smiled.
“I’m the type likes to surprise, the type likes
A good lie under a good, god-given disguise.”
It wasn’t safe to be his companion, but I let him
Drive us home, all the same, all the while
Watching for deer he wouldn’t spot, watching
For police cars out of the corners of my eyes,
Watching the rare-meat red sunset glow sink
Far beyond his headlights, watching stars rise.

The Eternal Transitory, Saint George, Utah, 14 November 2018

Something in the evening suspects it is not
Going to last forever, this state of affairs
In which everything must always be
Changing, however incrementally. Donne
Got at It allegorically, anthropomorphically,
With his “Death, Thou too shalt die.” Change
Changes as constantly as any other thing
Changing, and perhaps, like all we underlings,
Will change itself out of existence, no longer
To be the eternal transitory, leaving only
The eternal in its wake. For the rest of us,
That’s the change to nothingness, to never,
And it’s been said and sung that the eternal
Is a place where nothing ever happens, so
Maybe that’s the deal in this, the only
Scenario we know: when change ceases
To be change, it’s nothing, all the way down,
And then nothing, nothing forever happens

Mesquite, Nevada, 13 November 2018

The worst mass shooter in U.S. history
Kept a residence here for years. The palms
Tilted in November winds each of those years.
The casinos cried out terrible eurekas.
Could it possibly matter to say so now?
No it couldn’t, nor even then, maybe, not then.
There were corners of this town in the desert
Thriving, as there are corners in every town,
Shadows that never abandon the ground,
Unknown to anyone except the cornered,
Who know only the cornering comes for them.
I, for one, or many or legion, never came here
To gamble, but I brought a lover, a wife, a life,
Variously, when I stopped for gas or a beer.
Who was I? If you knew the answer, you’d tell me.
And if you had passed him by, if I had passed him by,
Could he have echoed any reason why we?

Galactic Disk Viewed from Springdale, Utah, 12 November 2018

Body put daughter to bed in what was now
Her grandparents’ house. Time to drive home.
In the sharp air, just above freezing and desert
Clear, there arched the old familiar span,
Seen rarely in the past year, bright arch,
Dusty margins, all-devouring darkness
At the heart of it, enough stars that surely
Some had perished after billion-year lives
In just the time since body had last looked into it.
Bones, milk, tears. Narrower and narrower
Choices of metaphors. If we were to insist
On name, on metaphor at all, might as well
Skip over the larger classes of all the vertebrates,
All the mammals, and collapse on the monophyletic,
Only human one. Only one being names patterns
In the skies. Only one weeps when it cries.

Desert Garden, Utah, 11 November 2018

The plants had names, the paths
Had families with small children. Less
And less, the road had traffic roaring past.
Less and less, the tamed walled wilderness.

White Peacock Flight, 10 November 2018

The little sliver of a shining thought slipped
Away. Night has more time to be torn apart
When nights are longer. The little lights
Below, the great lights faint afar, punched holes.
Close your doors. Keep your cupboards warm.
That thought that might have been worth
Pickling in its own words escaped. Let it go.
Someone breathes on the borrowed sofa.
Something scores the mirrored window.

Email, New Moon, Saint George, Utah, 9 November 2018

It’s such a pleasure, offspring asleep
In the next room with the dregs of a fever,
New moon invisibly rendered over suburbs
Sprawling around the absence of actual urb,

To tap at a flattened skeuomorph of orb
About the latest fashions in the music world.
We each value, sure, what each other thinks,
So long as neither one disturbs the long view.

More Evening Revenants, Red Mountain, 8 November 2018

The cottonwoods outlining the canyon creek
Flared first and faded. Then the ochre cliffs
Heaped up behind had a turn in the sun.
The high, dark laccolith went glowing grey.
Clouds would have glowed after that, but
There were no clouds at all this evening,
Just a bluish, yellowish blue, greyish blue
Distance once again losing the local light.
To you, survivor of thousands of sunsets,
It may have meant something, or felt like it,
Still, after so many years, after extra years
You hadn’t expected, this familiar sequence.
What goes with sequence? Consequences.
But you, who did not generate the sequence
Take no credit or blame for what follows,
What went with it. Funny animal to inhabit.
We found ourselves circling in your thoughts
Having circled for centuries and more
In others, exploring our temporary residence
Of you, who brought us to life, who brought
Us your life, however long we’d lain fallow
Between bodies. We would like to garland
Ourselves, or your memories with ourselves,
So that an ordinary beauty of desert sunset,
Once seen in sequence, would reanimate over
And over again, consequence of us, dancing.

Wavering, Saint George, Utah, 7 November 2018

Power, like resources, tends to be patchy.
Occasionally it appears more uniform,
Distributed like ocean waves or sand dunes
In vast swaths of scalloping near repetition.
They interchange, not only the lines of power
But the very nature of the view. This desert
Was once rippling with waves of fresh lava
Wavering the air, and was once a shallow
Inland sea, salt waves to the horizon. But,
The habit of wavering, of snaking along, ebb
And surge, withdraw and return, is hard
For this world to break. It is, after all, all
Waves in the end, although the amplitude
Varies across vast scales and at all scales.
The results trickle in, or come in rollers,
Breakers, tides, tsunami now and again.
Change, unlike power, remains continuous
But can swell so it feels like pure rupture
Or sink back to the whisper of a few grains
Of sand moving along the edge of a reservoir
In a time still littered with the tracks of dinosaurs.
How big was the last wave? And will the next
Erase it and all the powerful beasts caught in it?

Marry Unknown, Utah, 6 November 2018

Peering into the inverse pyramid
Of a miles-wide strip copper mine,
I listened, one time, to loudspeakers
Replaying a looped recording in tourist
Languages, such as German, such as English,
Such as Mandarin. The metallic echoes
Bounced around the scalloped absences
And would have kept on doing so, whether
I or any other pair of human ears were near
Or far, far away. What are we saying, any
Of us who artfully arrange our strange phrases,
In hopes they’ll echo in excavated landscapes
When we’re gone, when no one is there?
I couldn’t understand a word of the Mandarin,
But the whole holed holy mountain
Continued to mechanically converse.

Drought Pond in Bare Aspens, 5 November 2018

There are at least four distinct kinds of alone.
I list them here in rough ascending order,
Worst to finest. First, there is the aloneness
Of being in prolonged close quarters
With someone you cannot bear and who
Cannot bear you, could be a cell mate, could
Be a spouse. Awful. A little better, although
Most purely lonely, is the aloneness of living in town,
Any kind of town really, village to megacity,
Where there are people in the middle distance
Going about their many lives, while you hole up
In isolation. That’s the classic manner of aloneness
Known as alienation. Very melancholy, of course,
But not so horrible as the first kind.
Third, there is the companionable alone,
The one you sometimes find in libraries,
Study areas, diners, and cafes. You’re surrounded
By mostly calm, contented, focused people,
Some chatting amiably, and you sense them
Like a cozy shawl around your shoulders, even
As it also relaxes you to know that none of them
Is likely to make any kind of demands of you.
This is the most productive genre of alone,
Often sought out by scholars and writers.
Last and best, when you can get it anymore,
Is the true alone, the quiet hour or afternoon,
Possibly a few days even, removed from all
Society, out of sight or sound of any ongoing
Human activity. This can be frightening when
Storms or predators are in the area, or when
You’re hurt, lost, or low on supplies, of course.
Then your ancient, social animal’s terror of being
Caught out and helpless after dark lingers
Around the edges. But in most cases, when
The weather is not deadly threatening and
You know your way down off the mountain,
Out of the woods, and back into society, this
Sort of alone is precious and is happiness,
The fragrant cedar smoke from your fire,
If you choose to keep one, or only the tang
Of autumn leaves and the circling visits of wind
Moving near and far through the trees, like
A god, you could say, if you weren’t too pleased
To be free from any other anthromorph today.

Sunrise, Saint George, Utah, 4 November, 2018

The last day of daylight’s saving time is gone.
It’s not the dark mind being its usual dark self
You should distrust. It’s the dark mind being
Giddy you should keep an eye on, watchfully.

Not a Cage, Utah, 3 November 2018

It stands on its own six feet and considers
What it’s doing inside a verbal composition.
The head hurts at the back of the head, the neck.
I am, thinks the thing, a sort of an insect.
Carry on, then. Keep walking. Keep exploring.
You can’t beat an insect for finding the edges
Of the thing. We have to map the corners
Of our multiply-cornered existence. A trap,
Thinks the thing with a thorax and a creator
Named Kafka to thank for it. This is a trap.
And if it is, so what? Is anything one can’t evade
And fly away free from forever not a cage?

Low Light on Zion, 2 November 2018

See that thick cream-colored line in the cliff
Lit up by the sunset? There’s a few million
Years. And then something else entirely,
Abruptly. Stratigraphy makes for the most
Brutal enjambments. Ah, what we wish
Were predictable isn’t, and what we wish
Weren’t so damn predictable always is.

Career Assessment, Saint George, Utah, Day of the Dead, 2018

Escapism is not so different from any other
Vocation or avocation. An escapist is
A carpenter, a nurse, a collector, a performer
Who may be either ordinary or extraordinary,
May be moderately or unusually successful,
May have mundane or near-magical skills
In the art. I write this as an escapist, myself,
Me, composing and decomposing, and as these
Phrases, inherited, borrowed, stolen, fresh,
Arranged and self-arranging. We’re escaping.
We’re always escaping. How good are we?
That’s the only question. Not too damn good,
I’d estimate. That’s ok. Without mediocrity,
No profession would ever take the measure
Of its geniuses. And who would be the genius
Of escape we middling evasives most admire?
Not Houdini, to be sure. An illusionist is not
The same beast. Jesus would be a candidate,
Had he been real. To sneak out on death
After three days in the grave, most impressive.
Even Odysseus would have lowered his bow
In respect. No, let’s not credit the legends
And myths. Their only real escapists, if any,
Were not the characters but the scribes
And bards who cooked them up. Not enough.
Of course, bards and scribes are all of the tribe,
But I’d like an example of the true artist who
Escaped both as creation and as animal life.