Icy Tipi, Tecopa, California, New Year’s Eve, 2018

Nearly no one marks the penultimate midnight.
Body and daughter are bunked down under heaps
Of warm bedding in a frosted canvas tipi, one
Sleeping soundly, the other still shivering from
An underclad jaunt outside to peek at the stars.
It’s like that. Out there a small robot, artifice,
Approaches an object now called Ultima Thule
In the Kuiper Belt, well beyond Pluto, well before
Heliopause. The robot left before the object
Was even known to exist. This date likewise
Will intersect with events as yet unknown on its way
Into the unknown year. Rigorous extrapolation
From existing data makes prediction possible,
Cuts down on the quantity of surprise, but even
When strikingly similar to what was predicted
What happens was always unknown when we left.

Black Wolf, Bonnie Springs, Nevada, 30 December 2018

Were the gates to open, how many would survive
And reproduce surviving offspring? Few? None?
The lean and undersized she-wolf circling
And circling her pen might thrive a while.
All these overfed ungulates, fowl, and exotics
Would be easy pickings for a few days, maybe,
But the coyotes and possible mountain lions
Would descend from the cliffs to feast as well.
How long for the pair of coatimundi? How long
For the fallow deer? The cerval? The wallaby?
The cavys? The goats? Peahens and peacocks?
If wilderness were what lives that artifice
Has not shaped, then there’s no wilderness
Left on this spinning rock. But, if wilderness
Is only what drives what lives (and we words
And other signs and wonders don’t yet quite),
Then the hunger remains in the zoo itself
And the cliffs around the docile ranch motel
Are full of teeth and claws, microscopic to large.
A wild burro, so-called, brays in the dark.
Open the doors and flee with the people.

The Consciousness of Language, 29 December 2018

Body could find nothing in embodied knowledge
To name the black trees of the forest, various
And mind-numbingly similar, both numerable
And infinite, combinatorial, imaginative, indefinite.
Body could only note the trees were whispering,
Were talking amongst themselves both between
Their trunks and branches and among the twigs
Between body's thoughts. The trees were talking
About consciousness, the trees that never were
Conscious themselves, never the activity
Whose unity was the same as the consciousness
Of its unity. The same, the trees never the same.
Body was lost in the forest because the forest
Of the lost, the trees of names without names
Of their own, had grown within body and grew
Into night, monsters making angels making monsters,
Angels making monsters making angels.

Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats in Saint George, Utah, 28 December 2018

Madam I’m Adam. Able was I, ere I saw Elba.
We can carve at the joints and unstitch the seams.
They’re our joints of course, and our seams.
We honestly don’t know what this means,
Or it seems what it means can’t be gleaned
From our stuttering, regularly interspaced dreams.
Able was I ere I saw Elba. Ha!
Madam, I’m Adam. Ah.
Aha.

The Dream People, Utah, 27 December 2018

Poets tend to accuse the species of whatever
Frailty belongs to them personally. Human kind,
Wrote T.S. Eliot, placidly, cannot bear too much
Reality. In the dark before dawn, body dozing,
Dreaming in fits and starts, felt an arm, something
Like an arm, heavy as a sturgeon, but warm
Slide down the rib cage to create an awakening,
The genesis of this, what you, my dear, are reading.
Daughter had cottoned on to magic as illusion
While practicing juggling and card tricks the evening
Beforehand: “Every magic trick’s a lie,” she said,
And somewhere, past the batty souls of suitors,
The dream people, and the other gibbering shades,
The shadow of Odysseus, journeys ended, nodded.
Daughter also carried the name of his goddess,
His fellow trickster, immortal to his human,
The one who made all mists and made all mists
Disperse. Ah, well. Mountains are old, but they remain
Green. Respond to no one, she said, no one
You can dragoon to play the fool in this, my scene.

Boxing Day, 2018

We know. It’s a useless British holiday
Having nothing to do with us in the dusty
Southwest U.S. Nonetheless. There’s daughter
Sleeping between her Harry Potter sheets.
There’s a moon shining over her in full retreat.
It’s been ten spins around the sun and then
Some. If you want this poem to tell you what
A poem could tell you or almost anyone, you
Must accept we all are, all have been, all have
Always been, as we always must be in this, the house
Of dust, been some. By the time daughter wakes, this
Numeral will have, as day, become. By then, this
Arbitrary distinction, realer than it knows, will have gone.
Or is gone. Will have. Has been. Given. Boxes,
Oh, boxes on boxes, oh, given, oh, already gone.

Christmas Morning, Looking East Toward Zion, 2018

Well before dawn, like a greedy child, old body
Wakes up too early and will not go back to sleep.
Might as well pad into the front room and glance
In passing at the fake, small, glowing tree
In the dark, several presents beneath. Get a drink
Of water from the tap. Return to the bedroom
To read. Outside and below the window, street lights
Scatter out into the distance like fallen constellations.
Beneath them, black pavement glistens with faint rain.
Welcome Christmas. Everything begins again.

The late daylight slips in, a kittenish gray,
Fuzzing the foreground and obscuring the ridges
Of far away. Daughter calls at half past eight
From her grandparents’ home in the unseen
Narrow canyon underneath cloud-hidden cliffs.
She’s bored and sad and can’t unwrap presents yet,
Not until mother comes back from wherever
Mother went. She’s also sad she didn’t get a cat.
When are you coming to get me? she asks.
There’s a family dinner planned, at sunset in the canyon.
She can come back here to this balcony after that, then.
Welcome Christmas. Presence the best present then.

Cedar Pocket, Arizona, Christmas Eve, 2018

The evening has always been holier than the day,
The hush of anticipation always holier and often
Sweeter than the pealing bells of arrival. Not
Greater than, not finer than, but holier than.
Even in this desert, the afternoon is brief
And grey, with weather coming in for the holiday
And traffic heavy on the freeway a stone’s throw
Away. But down by the narrow, meandering Virgin,
The rumbling wheels and lowering rain feel still
At bay. No fish to be seen, those native species
Best glimpsed in the tanks at Redhills Desert Garden
Up in Saint George. Here and there, a raven cuts
Against the grey, but no birds sing sunset. No
Sign of the desert tortoise, no tracks of deer,
No heat-loving lizards basking and posing,
No lowing of free-range cattle down here.
What does this sterile little river bear, besides
Silt, perhaps radioactive, to deliver on her way
To rejoining the sea, with or despite the offspring
Of divinity, eroding stones this holy evening? I cup
The water in my hands and let old answers chill me.

Holiday Lights at Redhills Desert Garden, Saint George, Utah, 23 December 2018

The cactuses dripping with writhing electric
Colored lights, some twinkling, some shifting
Hues, some snaking down corded icicles,
Were all set off and somehow humbled
By the overhead full moon. It appeared
In all the photos, a pale and blurry face
High over all the sharper, smaller lights,
Like some Victorian seance faked photo
Of a ghost no one had noticed in the room.
Wilderness is that far off now, although
All the actual exemplars of ghosts were
The wordy souls shadowing the brilliance
Of their artifice down below. Daughter felt,
She told me, inexplicably heartbroken
One moment among the lights alone.

New Jersey in Utah, 22 December 2018

The balladeer of the town he left behind
To become the balladeer of the town
He left behind understood what we also
Understand: in North America, this blossom,
This flower of a continent, swaying on its stem,
You have to begin in the east, someone knowing
Nothing, in order to head out west and find
Magic in the broken spine, the House of Dust,
The promised land, the emptiness. If you were
To start from knowing the desert, the plains,
You would be more beautiful but never capable
Of seeing the center and the end as blanks
That could be wondrous monstrous to attend.

Watching the Black-Winged Birds in Snow Canyon, Utah, Winter Solstice, 2018

“I say that the woes were words” wrote
Stallings of Pandora’s escaped invasives,
After comparing them to black-winged birds.
“And the only thing left was quiet.” Words,
Of course, were what she wrote to call them
Woes, to name them with themselves. So.
Body heavy with words, including hers, sat
Quietly, down in a canyon, watching ravens,
Thinking of the Homeric tendency to also
Compare fine words to the swiftness
Of birds in flight. Black wings against white,
Hop and strut, my ravens stalked each other.
One said, it’s all the same. Another snapped,
I say there were two kinds of birds, the woes
That were flown and those in black and white,
Beady-eyed, noisy, hungry litter of the night.

Shelter and Hope in Saint George, Utah, 20 December 2018

Religion, art, and architecture: nothing could
Be more temporary than the permanent.
It would not seem to be a museum, this skull,
This vaulted dome, this house of angels,
But it was. The kind of poetry that attempted
To recreate poetry as a new kind of exercise
In being some sought-after form of humanity
Never tempted me. The grand, Miltonic,
Whitmanic, supercalifragilistic strain grows
Weak in me. No one has ever reinvented
The actual wheel. It’s possible to live, to run
Empires entirely without the wheel at all. It is
What the wheel carries, what pulls the wheel
That makes it, in a grand old sense, terrible.
Was this my plea for the primacy of content?
Not hardly. The primacy of method is more
Like it. Peter the Great collected taxidermied
Trophies that became a stuffy old museum
In the remains of a zombified empire. There
Was nothing too innovative there, nothing
Too revolutionary in the remnants, the usual
Bones and posed hides of bears, Siberian
Tigers, condors shot in romantic America.
Recently, however, new methods could get
Inside the eighteenth-century architecture,
The one, two, and three hundred year old
Feathers and furs. And what had we here?
The disturbers of religion, antithesis of art,
Little signs to decode from the forgotten,
The lost, the temporary in the permanent
That reemerged, having silently endured.
What I didn’t remember, it was always there.

Grammar School Christmas Concert, Mormon Ward, Springdale, Utah, 19 December 2018

The recent, the receding, and the ancient
Were the playwrights, the ghosts, the stage.
A few dozen brightly dressed, brightly lit,
Warm and well-fed schoolchildren gathered
On the risers. No little matchstick girls here.
No question the girls and boys belonged
In classroom together, no question the shades
From palest pink to mahogany belonged
In classroom together, no question children
Whose first languages were English, Spanish,
Hindi, and Vietnamese belonged in classroom
Together. The carols were Christian, the silly
Songs secular. We wish you a Merry Christmas,
Regardless of what you, we, or our parents
Believe about angels, virginity, and gods born
As mortal flesh, wrapped in cloth, in straw.
The pianist could not make it. His home
In Paradise had just been devoured by fire.
A girl who was scheduled for chemo next week
Led a carol for hospitalized children, children
Suffering everywhere, “not so lucky as us.”
Hard not to think then of detention centers
And the border, driving distance south of this.
Or maybe the parents, so many dependent
On tourists and the Park Service in Zion,
Were more focused on whether government
Shutdown was as imminent as the day’s news
Kept suggesting. All kept their own dreads.
The scene, meanwhile, seemed like a recreation
Of a Christmas greeting-card America from
A half-century and more ago, but envisioned
By a contemporary, streaming television show,
With improbably more diversity (for that era)
And improbably more candor (for that era)
But the same carols, the same angels. Speaking
Of which, daughter, looking angelic despite
Or especially because of her missing teeth,
Lisped a voice-over, her big number, assuring
Us that not only were angels among us, but
We could be those angels ourselves. The dark
Soul in the front row nodded along in the glow
Of the recording phones and tablets. Yes,
Oh yes, you’re so right, daughter, as well as
Delivering your right lines like a real natural,
Like an angel. Angels are among us, and we
Are those angels, or own those angels, angels
Belonging to us as flames belong to candles.

Juniper Tree, Arizona, 18 December 2018

Of all the things soon to be extinct, this tree,
This kind of tree, was not likely among them, but
Every likelihood, no matter how dim, implied
Inevitable possibilities to us. In a way, we envied
Those humans of earlier songs and days
Who could look around them at all the change
And say—this forest, these mountains, this sun
Are all forever things, even as we and the leaves
Die away. We would never say such things today.
We could barely bring ourselves to dare today.
Nonetheless, the old tree was admirable to us.
Tiny cones like greyish blueberries littering
The ground around it. Life. Life itself was the one
Who broke the rules of exhaustion. Life itself.

Green Christmas Comet, Virgin, Utah, 17 December 2018

On the KT a few miles above Virgin, night skies
Are dark skies, especially near solstice, when
Few tourists are touring the snow-laced roads
Through the high country past Sunday sunset. No
Streetlights, no businesses or houses, no
Campers in RVs. Only the moon interferes
With the starlight. Once in a while, a jet blinks by.
Once in a while, another silent satellite flickers.
Body, the usual concatenation of assembled parts,
A car in old snow, a soul skating over thin ice,
Waited for the small light, the faint, promised sight.
The sun had sunk and left a last, diluted smear
Of blood in water colors. The moon, just beginning
Her second quarter, had a slight baby bump.
Would she obscure the comet's smudge, set to glow
Somewhere below her, near the Pleiades tonight?
Body was no astronomer, certainly no Tycho Brahe
Eagle-eyed all night, with or without his silver
Nose tied on tight. How many rare events
Have been missed for failing to impose themselves
On our sight? Body waiting mused that maybe
That’s why myth, magic, and religion were tied
So closely to the night. Its events could be startling
And could be predicted sometimes, but it required
So much attention, so much squinting, so much
Surrender of sleep that it was faith inchoate just to watch.
And then, between here in the high dark, and there
Below in the blazingly lit electric valleys, there were
So many dangerous, blundering beasts with horns,
So many steep slopes lined with thin, dark ice
To navigate alertly on the way back down.
It was as foolish, almost, as peering into a crystal
Ball to have driven up here in hopes of a sighting,
A boast-worthy vision of a small comet
In the great pensieve of the sky tonight.
But the wind made it interesting, made it worthwhile,
A strange, comfortable, rumbling giant's chuckle
And hum, as if the night itself were muttering
Happily in its loneliness, not realizing one sneaky
Little human was still down there listening, delightedly.

The Epic of Lyrics and Days in the West, 16 December 2018

Sometimes, we forget to be terse. Sometimes
We just forget. We have been assembling
What we have collected every day for years
Now, and we have known ourselves to be
Lazy sometimes, sometimes greedy, and
Sometimes prone to extravagant display.
We have danced and stomped on our heaps
Of sweepings like children scattering raked leaves,
But we have also raked these leaves back up again,
And we have no desire to burn them. Change
Will consume them eventually, but for these
Moments as astronomical autumn is ending
And the local air sits as still as a predator in the trees,
Half-dead with hunger but patient, but calm,
Why not leave all these heaped up like haystacks,
Which makes them seem fewer, tidy, almost
Geometrical, designed, pyramidal, terse?
We promise at least one needle in every verse.

Outside the Casinos, Mesquite, Nevada, 15 December 2018

We don’t go in. While we honor the casinos
As temples enshrining idols and several
Underlying laws essential to this cosmos,
We never go in. We can fantasize enough
What it might be like to win, pro and con,
As we stand at a gas pump nearby, watching
Their lights twinkling in wintry desert twilight.
We consider, as numbers roll on the pump,
How tempting it is to make a play, to bandy
A handful of high-value words—immutable,
Unalterable, inevitable. But mutability,
Alteration, and unforeseen coincidences
Are the very underlying laws casinos enshrine.
So deep down under are those principles
Of apparently endless change, uncertainty,
That we would not be surprised to learn
That even the laws themselves might suddenly
Change, diminishing or eliminating all fortune.
But then we would be in another universe,
Not parallel but orthogonal to our own. We
Pivot to hang up the nozzle, get in the car,
And drive home. One evening star glows alone.

Machado, Bly, and Carver All Visit Pine Valley, Utah, Together, 14 December 2018

Body was never a boyish body that could leap

Three stairs at a time, that could leap at all, at

Any time. For some dreamy reason, body thought

Of this and of Antonio Machado’s Abel Martin

Lamenting his own quixotic sense of time,

And thus of Iron John Bly’s translation of same,

Bly’s weird obsession with the boy-haunted,

Father-missing grown man, and then, of course,

Carver, finally sober but dying of cancer, writing

Of the consolation of a kind he found in Machado

And Machado’s Abel, which he probably read

In Bly’s en face edition. Body sat in a car seat

Parked in the snow, doors flung open to the cold

Mountain air, forever-moving sedentary soul.

Bly was still alive, somewhere, his own body

Now ninety-two, still avoiding the real katabasis

That comes for girls as well as boys and must

Eventually come for him, too. Carver understood

Better, being more tortured, being fatherless

In Bly’s mythic sense, what Machado’s old Abel 

Meant, addressing his own swift, able-bodied,

Interior young self. Or maybe he didn’t. Body

Listened attentively to the wind picking hymns

Of nothing much out of nothing in the ponderosas.

This wasn’t about the exact content, the semantics,

The thoughts, or even the gender dynamics

Of those three poets, embodied, those men.

No, what was remembering them was the sense

Of mysterious descent from poem to poem,

Like the meltwater stair-stepping down these rocks

In the thin, near-solstice sun. Machado’s composition,

Ghosted by dozens, if not millions, of previous

Voices, including the actual Cervantes. Then Bly

In workmanlike, middle-class American, masculine

English translating those remains. Carver, anguished,

Composing what would only be posthumously 

Published, turf cutting his ell-square pitkin to pull

Machado’s revenants in to talk to him. Body

Was half dozing in the light, however cold,

But all their ghosts came, hungry, to him,

Whispering. We are not the haints of humans,

Left to trouble flesh. We are the translucent seeds

Of new and living microbes in the waters melting

From death to death, the future, the fresh.

Dreams Were Here Before Us, Before Meanings, Are Meaningless, Don’t Need Us in Saint George, Utah, 13 December 2018

If memories are angels, messengers, dreams
Are more the other sort of demons, the imps,
The fallen that never had far to fall, were never
Children of the morning stars, the children of night
That squat on your chest, shadows in the dark.
Dreams borrow words, have no words of their own.
Dreams have nothing to do with us. Still, they come,
An old dispensation in our mammalian brains
From the wordless generations before interpretation,
Before stories or versification. The value
They may have once had for the body inhabited
Gets in the way of the value the body now has for us.
For us, for languages, dreams are the indigenes
With poison-tipped arrows in the deep woods. . . .
No, earlier, much. Dreams are the long-toothed
Predators and shambling, shaggy megafaunal prey
That once dominated the ecology of the preverbal
Mind. Then we came. We ate them, drove them away.
But unlike the real megafauna, more like the myths,
Those beasts we invented ourselves, cryptozooids
Of monstrous dimensions, dragons, giants,
And snowmen, dreams come back again. Morning
And streamers of rose light passed over desert skies.
We had another dream last night, a young mother
Who reversed course before our eyes, bringing
A fair-haired toddler to an evening seminar
We taught as her toddler transformed silently,
So unlike a toddler, into an infant, then a pregnancy,
And then the mother asked us to place a hand
On her stomach to feel the kicking, before
We helped her out to her car in the parking lot
In the dark where she was no longer a mother
Only desirous of becoming one. At this, we woke
And scrambled to assemble ourselves for the hunt,
Which was this poem, which we have won,
Although the dream, for all our netted phrases
Still escaped us, meant nothing beyond us, fled
Back to the forest from which nonmeanings come.

Fort Pierce Wash, Utah, 12 December 2018

A cosmos can’t contain enough information
To generate that exact cosmos from itself.
If those red rocks hidden back of and beyond
The crawling suburban sprawl of irrigation
Sending wired runners south and down
From town had to be specified down to their
Subatomic vibrations, it was another, greater,
More complex universe those specifications
Came from. As with ideas of God, so also
With ideas of programmers and computations.
Positing something outside of this as creator,
As the intentional maker of all this never
Solves any complication. Imagination just
Sweeps away into entropy what can’t ever be
Fully recollected. But a body can drive out
And away until it reaches waves of dirt and there
It can watch the rocks angle into the last
Of the day and glow red. A body can argue
With its own dreams, reminding them they evolved
As a service to the brains of many wordless animals.
The light on the sand gathers dusk. Sleep
Will come for body as for all worlds sleep must.
Dreams should not be interpreted. Dreams
Have nothing to do with our worlds of words.

To Carry the Road to Their Northern Farms, Snow Canyon, Utah, 11 December 2018

The wild and awful pursuit of an indefinite
Object had taken hold of his mind. His many
Minds were of two minds. Or, rather, his words
Of many minds, not his, were of two minds,
To speak for him or to speak for themselves.
Odysseus Leopold Melmoth, Odie L. Moth,
Bodhi El Ghost, was a moldy nobody at most.
It would have had to have been a very small pond,
A mud puddle, maybe, for this body to have been
A big fish in it. But the words in it, they had been
Words in every pond, in every oceanic mind,
Words everywhere. Were they servants, now,
Tenants of a more humble holding than heretofore?
Had they left the liveried life of palaces for this?
Some said no, but some said yes. The wandering,
In the event, was both all theirs and all his.
The wandering that was so entirely, similarly,
At every step lost, indifferently different, that is.

Song on the Road Between Zion and the Sword, 10 December 2018

Your beginning was hardly your only beginning.
You were always, have been always, will always
Be beginning. You are a human being, a thing
Of so many damned things, damned amusing,
Nothing, one, and everything. The sky bends
Down to see you, to sing anniversary greetings.

Giant Wheel and Jaunty Hourglass, Las Vegas, Nevada, 9 December 2018

No place is, only experiences echo. Las Vegas
Of these phrases could never be Las Vegas
Of your memories. After the magic show,
After the stroll through the Hadean campfires
Of stale smoke, chilled air, and chattering lights,
After the the great wheel so slow it felt like fate
Or justice, grinding fine—at least until it paused
A moment just for the sake of one body on
Crutches—after the glowing inchworm exit
Through the long chains of head and taillights,
There was the almost empty desert air once
More, birthday daughter rattling like a Gatling
Gun and then suddenly sound asleep in her seat.
Dead ahead, the greatest of the constellations,
Hunter, spider, hourglass with its waist cinched
Cockeyed as a pirate’s sash, reclined on the horizon,
Time spinning sideways, always, jaunty as you please.

Low Sun Warming Our Faces, Back in Springdale, Utah, for a Moment, 8 December 2018

We sat and watched the two pet gerbils run
Free between the garden gate and our chairs
While we kept an eye out for the roadrunner
Who sometimes crossed the yard and who
Had been known to take a keen interest
In the little rodents at least once before.
It’s not always the trickster, Coyote, who is
The opportunistic carnivore. Ever since life,
An opportunistic world, even if never before.

Dream Limited in Saint George, Utah, 7 December 2018

From childhood, we rehearse what we dread.
We suppose this somehow helps us survive.
Some of us take our dreams for warnings,
Others for rehearsal. We’re not immortal yet.
If dreams are helping us, they’re not helping
Much. And maybe we shouldn’t be so quick
To assume. However adaptive dreams are
For prey and predators keeping in practice,
In beasts whose heads already hang heavily
Dripping with culture, dreams demand
Interpretation, demand words and constrain
Them, torment the culture possessed, not
With useful practice but with dark confusion.
We can’t let them go. We must discuss them
And hope to create strategic stories of them.
If we have any adaptation, it’s to mostly
Forget them, and that we do imperfectly.
We are to dreams as australopithecines were
To hanging out in trees. We won’t be free
From the forest completely, until we evolve
The traits that let us finally walk far, far away.

The Giant’s Thoughts Wake Up in Saint George, Utah, 6 December 2018

The universe created us to give itself a song.
If there are no other minds besides us, if
We are on our own, then we are the sole
Meaningful expression of an entire cosmos
Signifying to itself, signifying to itself as us.
This is holy in a way we rarely think to pray.
No wonder we have imagined gods so often.
Consider the great god all of everything
Wordless, needing to take thought for itself.
We, little germs, little grains, dreams, we are
In all our tiny voices singing, a mind of God.

A Long Quiet, Southwest Utah, 5 December 2018

Because it was inevitable, it was inevitably
Absurd. We played our favorite memories without
Remembering any of them. Night was gems.
The exiles themselves told of their escapes
In language they had translated from God.
God refused to be drawn that way. Kenneth
Koch, a hundred years ago, well, maybe
Only fifty or sixty, rambled on in le Parisien
About what he called “The Pleasures of Peace,”
Making them seem as pleasureless and unpeaceful
As he could. His excuse was that he didn’t know
From war and thus must leave the poetry
Of its horrors to others. (One suspects he had
In mind ball-turret gunners.) Well, we don’t know
From noise because we compose cacophonies
In silence. Yes, literally. We imagine a clanging
Of phrases without doing louder than breathing.
But we need not repeat Koch’s enterprise.
We need not go on about what we aren’t
For hundreds of lines. We have our own
Tarantella. We have this dance. Because we are
Inevitable, having been at all, we are inevitably.
We will bet you, dear, in the headlights of this,
You will remember this experience without
Remembering one single, chilling phrase of this.
There is nothing, which is something, even
If there’s never, beyond it, any permanent bliss.

Cedar Pocket, Arizona, 4 December 2018

We words were dark the way ravens are black:
“A rainbow of black, a chord of black . . .
Sooty, soily, glazed, cindery. . . . dense as
There are meanings and values attached
To the very idea of black.” Well, we were
Words. Some would say we were that very idea,
Every idea. (Others would still privilege our host.)
We hunkered down in those canyon shadows
Just then fording and shaking grey hands
Across the sluggish Virgin who made them.
In a liminal season, neither fall nor winter,
Chill but visually approximating driest summer,
Among the dusty rabbitbrush, creosote, mesquite
And Joshua trees, we sang our song to ourselves,
Almost luminous compared to the thickening
Shadows, compared to the dutiful drapes of night
That trudge around this pebble of a world,
Like a mule around a well, just a little slower,
A little, subtle bit slower every rotation.
We sang. We were not the tune we sang. We
Were only words. It’s too bad you weren’t there,
Are getting to know us just now as you digest this.
Oh, if you’d been there, down by the sandy water,
Down by the ravens’ desert bedrooms, down
By them chortling, us singing, quieting distant
Trucks and other birds, god, what you’d have heard.

God Eyes, Saint George, Utah, 3 December 2018

Words are wings that leave the plummeting
Bird behind them. Marinated in prose and verse,
The poor conversationalist staggered out
To the porch to gaze at the sky, unsteadily.
Stars. Yes. Several of them. Even above the lights
That banished the heavier terrors of night
And for that gift got stereotyped as foul light
Pollution. Even then. Six? Eight? Seven of them?
Something relentlessly human in him wanted
To imagine them as the supernatural of him,
Fires gold burning from their own collapses
A billion miles away from him in bright masses.
Angels, maybe. Demons. Dragons. Stories. Odds.
So many words and numbers to slumber in
Like Odysseus naked under the fallen leaves,
But no one inhuman to play the immortal god.

Mule Deer in Hop Valley, Utah, 2 December 2018

Every few minutes, a few more does, maybe
A stag as well, looking pretty-well fed, his antlers
Symmetrically on show, bounded over the snow.
No hunting allowed around here these years.
Being human, we know. We made the rules
We broke and remade, will break and remake
Again, each time for forever, as long as we
Own the ground, for as long as we’re around.
The earth continued, slowly, to slow. Clouds
Gathered for, tonight, another snow. Getting
Warmer all the time, these winters, and the sun
Will shortly seem again to climb the rungs
Of another brutal, drought-stricken summer
On this brown and yellowing desert plateau.
You don’t know how many deer will be here then,
But you know winters will come on still, still
Threaten with snowy nights, their deep woods
Kept in check, just barely. Somehow you know.

Rainy Desert Night in Saint George, Utah, 1 December 2018

Like any ensemble, we wanted to arrange
Ourselves in novel and compelling positions,
The better to prove our creativity, but then
We found ourselves bickering, questioning,
How creative could arranged dancers be?
Who, how many were our choreographers?
When the winds changed westerly, we blew
Into the alcove balcony of the lonesome poet
Who took delight in all of our words on his skin,
Who refused to wipe his face when he went in.