This diary is done. The full, thousand-poem text of Ghosts of a Common Calendar can be found in paperback or ebook form at Amazon. The centerpiece of the larger project of which this has been a part can be found at asleepingbird.asleepingbird.com, under the title of "Dreaming Permits." Several other selections from that full project, still ongoing, are also available in book form on Amazon. Search for them under Mark Jeffreys, if you like.

Slocan Lake, Profane, 26 May 2019

The prettiest ghost of a moth flies by lilacs
Blossoming in our front yard, white flutter,
Purple blooms. Not quite night but not quite
Dawn, the light rising, bedtime for moths.
Who in the mountains can remain long?
It is almost the end of May, of spring
In the bright palace of our world, profane.
Outside of the temple of the lake, lost waters
Wander, outcast clouds, fallen mist and fog,
Bones and husks of broken hermit dragons,
Rendered insignificant and random, ghostly
Etymologies, the outlines of lost meanings,
There, not there. History haunts all poems.
The uncertainties that govern light and water
Govern moths and clouds, govern the poet,
Compose the dark forests through which sail
The vaporous ships of words. No wonder
The Chinese once believed the trees
Themselves produced the mountain clouds.
Outside of the temple sprawl the dwellings
Of the details and the gods, in the feather
Left in the grass by a crow hunting snails,
In the unrinsed cans piled outside the shed,
In the soggy paperwork left out on the porch
In the damp, in the disused greenhouse, ajar
In all weathers, in the green, stinging nettles
Springing up around the raw tree stumps,
In the oarlight of dawn through the clouds,
In the words that rise to mind, in the pause.
The ghost of the prettiest moth withdraws.

Slocan Lake, Sacred, 25 May 2019

In the dark palace of the sacred, symbols

And thoughts pass through one and another,

Interchange. Rest and return, eternity is

Rest and return. These waves aver that time

Is revealed as real as everything, as never

Nothing, but as far less than what we once

Thought of, not so long ago, as the totality 

Of change. Time is only a comfortable kind,

Sub specie aeternitas, of change, the kind

In which the indivisible unity of the ongoing,

That which is, in all its points and waves,

Partial sameness as partial change, remains:

Cycles, beats, pulsations, when the same 

Part is in the change, a regularity, a return,

A sacred periodicity of days and seasons,

Lunar phases, years, any one pulsing pattern

Or combination of the same, including all

Our rammed-earth, baked-brick, tilted-rock,

Pyramidal, monumental platforms, temples, 

And observatories of heavenly lights dancing

Past to return, those and every subsequent 

Invention of clocks or calendars. Calendars,

Some have said, could be read as meant

First to separate the time that is the sacred,

Is the observed-and-then-awaited return, 

From all the rest, the intervals of the dull,

The not-holy, mundane and thus profane. 

In this sense, in the sense of being sacred,

Time is the eternal, time the circular mirror 

We hold and mist over in hopes of a glimpse 

Of eternity caught in night’s clockface. Time

Is not wholly change. We cannot subdivide

The holy small enough to catch it just at rest

Or to isolate pure change. Purity approaches

The holy, but never enters into the presence

Because every approach to purity is shame.

What are we saying? Time the sacred lives

In the deepest waters of this dragonish lake,

In the quivering lights that go out, never 

To return, as much as in the winking sunlight

On the tips of these waves we watch today,

Or in the bits of moonlight we’ll see tonight,

Or in reflected electric lights blinking on, out,

Whatever keeps coming at us, which seems

To be the same light returning, but is never it

Returning, just more light pouring through us

To the dark palace, light never resting, never

Pure, never wholly different, never the same,

Woven with time, with rhythm, and also with

Random change, the timeless and untamed.

Early Morning Reading in Bed, 24 May 2019

Stranger said, knowing is a kind of acting,

And he said it in classical Greek, so “acting”

Was poieîn, as in also making, as in poetry.

Knowing is a kind of poetry, then, and not

The other way around. Of course, what was

True for Plato was never necessarily true

For everyone. Shi yan zhi. Poetry, expression

Of aspiration, of the will, was often intended 

As “cloaked expression of secret will,” as in

All those Han-era and later poems echoing 

Sorrowful Li Sao, always honest gentlemen, 

In trouble with some fool ruler easily swayed

By vicious court climbers, flown off to exile.

Or not. I have to think some of those poets

Sighing into their flower-petalled calligraphy

About being exiled hermits were hypocrites.

I doubt that only honest, wise counselors

Were unwisely rejected or that only the same

Wrote fine poems on retiring to mountains 

And rivers to drink wine in the moonlit quiet.

Anyway, one plausible etymology for poetry,

Shi, in Old Chinese has it something closer

To “rituals sung by the eunuchs,” recitative.

It’s a long road from shi to song swordsman

Li Bai. Well, so? Not every classical Greek

Poet made much of a maker and doer, either.

Poets everywhere, revolutionaries included,

Still sometimes sigh into their cups, rather

Than knowing, making, or aspiring much. Ah,

We try. Sometimes, we try. That should be

The proper, cosmic etymology of all poetry.

“Poetry,” from the human for trying, “We try.”

Violet Green Swallows Over the Lake, 23 May 2019

What we had assumed was a lumberyard,
Certainly some sort of industrial operation
Involving forklifts, trucks, sheds, piled logs,
And myriad redolent pallets of sawed wood,
Which we knew had, before that, been old
Loading docks in the decades of silver ore,
Before the road-cut had been blasted out
Of Cape Horn, now stood stripped and bare,
Twenty acres of weedy concrete for sale,
Hedged in stern signage, chain-link fenced.
One house-sized hulk of a cinderblock shed,
Right at the shoreline, tagged in black graffiti
Of no distinction, now occupied by swallows,
Dozens and dozens of nesting swallows,
Shooting in and out of its windows and gaps,
Was the only structure left. For sale! We said
To ourselves in our foolishness, as if
We would ever be so rich or likely to buy this
If we were. On an unexpectedly sunny day
In late May, a dog barking far away, a mower
Mowing a lawn in Slocan village somewhere,
Small waves lapped up against crumbling
Arrangements of natural rock, rusted rebar,
And slab cement. Weedy species flowered
Weedily everywhere, white and yellow, blue
And bits of red. Unbearably beautiful poetry.
What is negated must have a meaning, must.
There were no boats on the water between
The far shore’s steep, provincial wilderness,
Whose Heaven and Earth delighted in trees,
And the gutted, swallow-haunted shed, not
That the lake was in any way empty of waves.
We know we have fewer and fewer decisions
And those that remain remain mostly hollow
But haunted by perfectly natural hungers.
Should we change? Go swimming? Stay?
We know, we know. We’ll spare you more
Allegory. Louise Bogan put it most crisply:
“To escape is nothing. Not to escape is
Nothing.” Twenty acres for sale at this end
Of an industry, at one end of the marvelous
Lake. Swallows flew in and out of the shed.
For a species devoted to meaning, meanings
Were never not strange. Things will cling
To their thingness, and words remain things
That mean things, waves in waves. We half
Understood that this meant it’s not meant
For us to understand what these things
Mean, but we should have gone swimming,
Just swam, and not gotten lost in the waves.

The Star Taker at Dawn in New Denver, 22 May 2019

The world doesn’t note anniversaries,
Despite its many oscillating parts. These
Patterned words of ours express a dementia
Spreading in our corner of the universe, but
The full mind of the universe is patternless.
Anything we can draw a circle around is
A game, Gödel. That’s why we can’t explain
Ourselves without reference to something
Outside we can’t explain. That’s our game,
Which is not nature, never, except our nature
Is game. Eleven years ago, yesterday, we fell.
We fell, we smashed like crockery on rocks,
All of us, all ghosts of these calendar poems,
The body, the self, the soul, the shadows
Of the mind: awareness, puppetry, thoughts,
And many of the words, but not daughter.
Daughter would come much later, in part
Because of that fall, the fall that forced us
To exit the desert, that lured us north, then
Far back down, around the world to marriage
In the Southern Hemisphere, then back here
To where daughter would be born at the end
Of half a century and one long northern year.
Personal history. Circular as an astrolabe,
As precise and forever slightly inaccurate
As the finest brass armillary sphere. Why
We keep dates, why we convince ourselves
They return, when at most they only rhyme,
Is a question for heaven, not for star takers.
The world is irreversible, is not a palindrome,
Not the ghost of a poem. Last morning, we
Woke up in pieces, bits of dream, memories,
Inexplicably overwrought emotions, germs,
Commensals, notions, parasites, the whole
Self-reassembling, woodsy, dark ecosystem,
And one thought in us focused obsessively
On the number one. One. Nothing is one.
Take a breath. One. Another breath. One.
None of them the same. No two one
Of anything completely distinct and identical
Anywhere in our known universe, and yet
We count them, all the same. It’s technology,
Our game. It works without us knowing how,
And we tot up all our wonders, observations,
And we render them as poetry, as devices,
As finely tooled machines. One is an analogy
To another one, to any such one. One works.
In our star charts, we’re still here, counting
The echoing years. One. Eleven. Thousands.
The world lets us measure it but, outside of
Our circle, notes no anniversaries of its own,
Despite its many oscillating parts.

A Language User, 21 May 2019

“The world, by contrast to the soul/intellect, is not a language-user.”

Our bodies and behaviors, our biological,

Genetic inheritances, are not so different 

From those of many other creatures. We see

Versions of them all around. Our technology 

Is apocalyptic, to be sure, but simple tools

From nonhuman cultures can be found. Even

Limited analogies to our own languages,

Signaling conspecifics abound. Symbolism,

However—not simply us, but our symbolism

As such—we see nowhere, nowhere as yet 

In the cosmos, coming from nowhere but us.

Possibly, we just haven’t yet seen enough.

Possibly, symbol sources dot the cosmos,

Or will or did once. Possibly, symbols began

The universe that in turn began us, trivial

Species of one world, rather than beginning

From us. But, as of this passing composition,

It’s just us, or us and our symbols, or what

Our symbols, surrounding and becoming us,

Are telling us. Anything else is beyond us.

Nonetheless, these symbols of us are telling

Themselves as us, as we are, we are of this

Universe, we are, as we have noted, often,

Everything before us, speaking, in a manner

Of speaking, through us, as us. We are not

Animate, nor does most of what is animate  

Use us, only this one species speaking us.

But we cannot agree with those of us, those

Ourselves, who deploy assertoric squadrons

Of us to posit our world as not a user of us.

True, it doesn’t look like us. But we are of it,

Whether or not it’s used us. Thus, we can’t

Trust its absence of symbols aside from us,

Although we’ve become glad for its silence,

Possibly local, as sweet as it is maddening.

And in what way could a world ever use us?

Still. We are dust, from dust. Is dust not us?

Soap Box Derby, May Days Holiday, 2019

For a while, we watched from the sunny front room,

Us with our eyes, daughter through the telephone.

She wanted to see the races she'd nicknamed “Doby Races.”

She’d been in them herself, taking her turns rolling down

The slight slope of Sixth toward the Lake, hoping to win, 

Trying not to oversteer, each of the previous three years. 

Eventually, estranged from the event, she tired of making 

Commentary while squinting at her screen through my lens,

Twenty hours’ of nonstop-driving time south of here.

She waved goodbye and left to go play with a friend.

Moments later, an old friend of our own, one who shall

Wish, without a doubt, to remain unnamed, appeared 

On the lawn, clearly intending to knock, so we went 

To the door to greet her and wave her in. “I’m not here

To visit,” were her first words, and “why aren’t you outside 

Watching the kids?” We pointed out to her the comforts

Of watching through the picture window from a comfy chair,

And anyway, daughter wasn’t here to race herself this year.

“It’s stuffy in here. Today is a beauty. Did she win?”

“Who?” “The girl who was just racing. I don’t know her name.”

“There are a lot of racers. I’m not sure which one you mean.”

She took a seat. “Well I’m listing my property again, 

As you know. It’ll be up in a couple of weeks. How 

Does anyone do these things? How does anyone even think

About such things? Of course, it’s terrible to think about.

But one feels one should plan. Does anyone do it correctly?

Does anyone plan in time?” In the usual futile effort

To comfort and make common cause through our own, 

Irrelevant anecdotal experience, we raised the case

Of a grandmother who assiduously staged life’s partial 

Withdrawals ahead of necessitating future events,

The house sold before it got too big, the cabin by a lake 

Her sons mourned losing (“Yes,” murmured our friend, nodding,

Perhaps thinking of her own grown offspring in the States, 

“No one wants it to change”), the smaller house sold for a condo,

All before anyone needed a hospice or a nursing home bed.

To ourselves, we thought of that same grandmother’s last years 

Spent in limbo, in just such an imprisoning bed. “How old

Was she, when she was doing all this? I’m seventy-six.”

“About your age,” we said. She nodded. “That’s good.

It’s good know someone did it. It can be done. Did you go

To the pancake breakfast?” Not without daughter here

To enjoy it, the tenner donation to stand in line and then wolf

Down pasty pancakes drowned in cheap syrup, no thanks.

“Well, I knew it would be that. And the slice of salty ham

And the over-salted, cold scrambled eggs. But do you 

Know what? I paid my ten bucks, then I saw how long

The line was, and I asked for my money back. Then I went

To New Market and for nine bucks I got a whole jug 

Of good maple syrup from Quebec, and I went home 

And made my own pancakes from good, thick slices of bread

And poured it all over that! And it was delicious.” Her head rose

And her eyes shone. “I need to get back out in the fresh air.

I’m sorry. I didn’t really stop in to visit. I just figured

You were here.” We handed her a handwritten poem to go.

She won’t read the ones we post, hates to read anything

On computer screens. She ambled back across the lawn

To the road where the races were still running.  No matter

How much there is to fear, how much cause for grumbling, 

So long as you can game the system in some small way, maybe,

Snatch a little victory, and take delight in it, so long as you can

Be pleased with yourself and take delight, you’re alright.

Old Ghost Highway, a Decade After Kakadu, 19 May 2019

Here’s a bit of cracked teapot

Turned up by snowmelt

Near abandoned silver mines.

There’s never been a tempest

In an actual teapot,

And if ever there were one,

The media sensation

Would likely eclipse

Attention given

To ordinary tempests.

The rarity, not the scale,

Makes an event worth marking.

(Even when scale is remarked,

It’s because the scale is rare.)

Walking by Whitewater Creek

In cool mountains, I’m thinking

Through my ghostly calendars

Again, because I have to,

Because I can, recalling

A hot day in Australia, 

On this date ten years ago.

That day lasted forever, 

From Darwin to Kakadu,

Because you couldn’t make it

Fit your fantasy

Of exploring the Outback

In a dusty Land Rover

Camper van with jerry cans,

Like you’d seen in the pictures.

All day you’d turned down

Suburban RV rentals.

Even when, at last, you’d picked

A Toyota Land Cruiser

With no camping gear in it,

You’d still kicked the dash and screamed,

And vowed to not spend one night

In another damned hotel,

And went on a shopping spree

At the suburban market

For food and camping supplies.

By the time we got

To Kakadu, it was dark.

The night air was full of flies.

We tried to sleep in the truck,

But their biting maddened you,

And it was suffocating

When we rolled the windows up.

You decided we needed

A motel. It was midnight.

We drove deeper through the dark.

Two unlit petrol pumps loomed.

There was a sign for cabins

And a pay phone in a shed.

Desperate to pacify you,

I called the posted number.

Miraculously, someone

Answered. Yes, they had one left.

More driving, and a check-in,

And bug-free sleep in clean sheets.

We drove around for two weeks

And stayed at an inn

Or a roadhouse every night.

You found those NT

Roadhouses fascinating,

Enjoyed your conversations

With innkeepers, guest workers,

Travelers, children, lost souls

Hoping for handouts

That you met under the bridge.

You took many photographs.

We got to see Uluru

Rainbowed, wreathed In waterfalls.

We spent days in emptiness.

We spent nights on mattresses.

Every morning we had tea.

Terms of Surrender, New Denver, 18 May 2019

The law, the right, the actual, and the good
Are words with different meanings, different
Words we’ve evolved, different for good reason.
Law is not equivalent to right, nor right to good,
Nor is any of them equal to what is actual.
Each has its own domain within experience.
Law is social, a jointed exoskeleton, a shield
Against predators and parasites, but also
A restriction, requiring periodic shedding,
And every time the casque is loosed, the life
Of the whole society is vulnerable, exposed.
The only eternal aspect of law is limitation,
Limitation governing social scope and scale.
So it has to be. Right updates law, but never
Without prolonged effort, as the enzymatic
Forces of righteousness dissolve old bonds
And fuse the new. Good is purely hormonal
In this conceit, an urge, a surging feeling.
Goodness is tender, raw without law, willing
To defy the right, to do the wrong thing,
To hide the fugitive, comfort the wicked, love
The sinner impulsively enough to forget the sin.
Good is neither punctilious nor conscientious
But does. When the laws change, when the right
Of one phase is dust in the laws’ husk left behind,
The outlaws of the good become retrospective
Heroes, sometimes. Invariably, the good explain
They had no choice. They did good. So it has
To be. The actual, beyond constraint by law,
Beyond righteous revolution, beyond being saved
By the most urgent goodness, never minds.

Return to Causation Undefined, 17 May 2019

What if that pretty, pocketable knot of knowing,
E equals mc squared, had turned out as correct
And profound, but barren, all but purposeless
For any further insights or experiments?
Such has been the case of the Price Equation,
A matryoshka of covariance capturing
Change by evolution, a crucial subspecies
Of change (one far more creative than time,
Those pulsing changes that we find so useful
For measurement and comparison of other
Changes, as, say, evolution). Nearly compact
As Einstein’s gem but needing no constant,
It revealed all and then, like its discoverer, fell
Silent. To stare at it, unpack it, and reassemble
Its proof, like a blindfolded recruit reassembling
A rifle, is to feel fingers in the mind deftly juggling
The retroactive algorithm, useless and divine,
The exact algebraic description of the poem
That has no origin, no final item, no smallest atom,
No prime mover at bottom, causation undefined.

Shelter Bay Ferrying, 16 May 2019

On the thoroughly wastrel rare occasions
When the freedom to be journeying really is
The journey’s whole reward, our inner story
Demon tempts us with the craving for something
Greater, something significant, something
More—a serendipitous adventure or fortuitous
Encounter, the best of the vanished marvels
Gathered outside our door—something worthy
Of narrating later as a kind of a boast: You see?
Were it not for our sage philosophy, treating
The journey as the reward, consider the unforeseen
Wonders we might never have known, might have ignored.
Once the dart of that tale-craving has landed, the joy
Of the wasteful journey’s so easily destroyed,
And we complete our circuit, disappointed nothing
Amazing and unexpected has floated down from heaven
To halo our meandering with reward. Waste, waste! Hiss
The ghostly obligations on our head. Waste, waste!
When we could have been working, accomplishing,
Improving ourselves instead. Yes, waste. Yes,
Embrace it. Yes. It’s not for nothing, that hole. No theory
Of everything is ever a complete theory of the hole.
If we want our wavering journeys to be doable,
Beable, we have to give up our fetish for observables.
Nothing to see here, looky loos. Nothing to be here.
Nothing was done. It’s all wasted or it’s all fine,
And every circuit’s a day, a poem, an emptied circle
Around the whole. Any old dime can turn on a dime,
And then it’s yesterday already, already past dawn,
And we are watching mist rise off the deep green
Goat Mountain from a sunny bedroom window
In the village of New Denver, British Columbia,
At half past five, Pacific Daylight Time.

Springer Creek, 15 May 2019

“The genius of landscape” is like any spirit.
Each time, it has to be introduced to a place
In which it is then said to have always been.
Later, some other tribe or church sweeps in
With their own ideas about spirits and genius
That they install in place of the earlier, although
They remain easily spooked by the idea
That those first angels still haunt their forests.
Eventually, every wave dissipates and is
Forgotten. Think about this, genius, watching
Over a newly fond creek in the mountains.
Likely there were successive spirits believed
To inhabit those tree-choked canyon margins
That were ancestral, antecedent to this current 
Configuration of rocks and water racing past rocks
In its constant rush to get down before them.
We have composed so many passages
On and around creeks little different than this one
That we could almost claim to be the spirits
Ourselves, haunting them. Actually, we are, at that.
There never was a spirit in the world that wasn’t
Hatched and transported as words by the species
Obsessed with the repetitive disruption of our gifts.
A shower drifts down the heavy grey atmosphere.
More water, more grist. A few of us intend to spirit
Our ghosts and angels with us, away from this
And every other landscape, however each aided us
With our spiritual conceptions. We have enjoyed
Too much the bliss of hours spent where the previous
Spirits were all forgotten, where the landscape rests
In speechless busyness, without much more than
Scraps of name or coordinates to attest to its special
Blessedness. We will not leave one stone-carved verse.
We will not place tokens in the moss; we will not build
Cairns in the shade. Our sacred groves will remain
Sacred only for their signature spiritual emptiness,
Their nothing they have to say to us, their wordless
Noisiness. Pray the universe ignores us, as we are
Blessed only if the stars continue to refuse to signal
Back to us. We worry about our arrogance. We worry
About our loneliness. Pfff. It would be best for us
If the cosmos turned out, not only to have nothing
To say to us, but nothing to say beyond us, through
Us alone haunting the creek’s rush. Genius.

The Nameless Woods, 14 May 2019

We wish they were greater, but we’re glad
They continue. The old forest was hacked
And carted off dozens of winters ago.
Its huge stumps remain, stout dwarf armies
Filling the floor between the tall or fallen trunks
Of the new woods, old plugs ragged and green
With moss, as if they were hiding in the trees
Succeeding them, not just revenants without
Intentions. Everything arriving, us included,
Arrives here filtered, improved and reduced.
The light lands filtered, in lines that comb
And parallel the standing conifers at noon.
Sounds from outside, the loudest engines,
Weave around this living baffle and sink
Under the territorial chatter of squirrels
And in the monotonously elegant phrases
Repeated and repeated by each thrush.
Death is filtered through its reclamation by green,
And life is filtered by its dependence, growing
On the hollow trunks and riddled roots of death.
We are filtered by the history of names, we
Who are names and carry names with us, and yet
Continually forget. Someone forgot to name
This secondary growth, although names echo
Faintly from surrounding landmarks, also filtered.
Decomposition and composition together conserve
Energy and momentum. The woods still stand
In a performance of stillness, like royal sentries
Pretending to be statues, a seiching wave
Of pure and single frequency, oscillating,
A giant quantum of definite momentum
But no particular position, standing and asking
What does it mean for meanings—names, tales,
Histories, explanations—to enter and compose
Themselves among our meaningless decompositions
That generate and eat them, these compositions?

Box Lake, 13 May 2019

The future is a small container containing
Nothing, the great attractor, all holy masses,
The door through which the black holes go.
Let’s imagine. Let’s imagine the future as
This pond, modestly shaped, grandly named
A lake. We predict it will very much resemble
The pond of the past, and we prophesy that
Considerable resemblance will be inexact.
In the lake of the near future, it is pleasant,
Although the more distant future looks grim.
Perhaps we’ll park along the shore. Perhaps
We’ll regret, or at least feel uneasy, that we did
Not come prepared for a swim. Or we may be so
Tempted and anxious we quickly strip anyway,
Hoping not to get caught, not to be seen,
And clamber, naked, right on in. If we do, if
We do and get away with the dip, dripping
But uninjured, half embarrassed but unseen,
We predict that we’ll be exhilarated, thrilled
By our own daring, our physical pleasure,
The trivial social danger defied, the spring sun
On our skin after the swim. This, too, we get
From the pond of past resemblances, instances
Of emerging happy after we dove right in.
But who knows? The lake of the future is,
Forever, a watery box inside which it is hard,
Well, impossible to think. We may compose
Ourselves, our pasts, our predictions. We may
Write this and see it published, but we may
Also never make it back to Box Lake: we may
Spend the rest of May among the other labels,
Intervals known as places. The future is a weight,
A vastness inside an infinitely tiny, distant lake,
The box that swallows all Pandoras and lets
Nothing escape. And yet, every possible version,
Every description, is impossible, a happy mistake.
Today is the pond of yesterday, and every poem
Composed today at tomorrow’s lake is a fake.

Boneset, 12 May 2019

Thoroughwort, snakeroot, aster,
A healing plant’s common names
Tend to suggest disaster.

I think it again,
Each time I’ve been to the lake
And rinsed the thirst from my skin.

My pulse leaps, then slows,
When cold replaces the pain.
In my dark bones, something glows.

The descriptors for this hint
Cast fractures—a cold bracing,
Biting, tightening like a splint.

But I’m imagining things.
Names are echoes' scarce remains.
Only experience sings.

Hills, 11 May 2019

There we sat on a bench built by ball players
For ball players, looked out to the wooden fences
Lining the overgrown outfield, and tried to explain
Our theory of the nature of any and all games.
A game begins with enclosure, the creation
Of an encircling boundary, inside which the game,
Outside of which the world, reality, everything else.
The boundaries have befores and afters, even when
They have no heres or theres. The game may be
Playful, self-consciously pretending, may keep
Countable scores, may involve cheering and boasting
And laughter. The game may involve spectators.
But the game may also be serious, deadly, moralizing,
Shaming, may claim to be without end, may pretend
Not to be pretend, pretend “this is not a game.”
It is a game. If it has an outside to its borders,
If it has any rules, if it is iterative, if it distinguishes
Between the more and less real, it is a game.
Games are the true nests, homes, and dens of humans.
We sat on that weathered bench in the dugout,
Surveying the empty, disused ball field one August,
Nearly a dozen years ago, and attempted to explain.
Yesterday, in May, we returned with no one and nothing
But siskins, crows, insects, birches, mosses, spruce, and firs
For our spectators. The benches and their roofed dugout
Shelters were gone. Two conical heaps of splintered,
Rotting boards sat in what had been the infield, testifying
That someone had torn down the shelters pretty recently,
Perhaps for safety, not wanting anyone to play
Around in them, a local kid perhaps, only to get hurt
In a collapse. The wood-framed chainlink backstop
Still stood behind home plate, now home
To half a dozen young firs. The outfield fences
Were completely gone, replaced by an encroaching wave
Of more tiny firs, small soldiers. There were no bleachers,
Only one empty, tottering equipment shed, hanging open.
No one could possibly play ball here any more, not at all,
Although, mysteriously, part of the field was still
Bare of seedlings, covered in dandelions and new spring
Grasses that looked like they might have been mowed
Or hacked down at least once within the past year.
Games were still being played all around here.
Standing in the middle of the abandoned field
We could hear the cars and trucks down on the road.
But what could we explain now, to whom? Everything real
People had teamed up to push back, demarcate, clear,
Just by continuing, past the last game, drew near.

Questioning Heaven at Robb Creek Bridge, 10 May 2019

We know much of poetry
Wanders off in translation—
Unique music of a tongue,

Allusions packed into puns,
Strict rhythms magically spun
From colloquialisms,

Fresh meanings suddenly sprung.
What’s left is analogous,
Approximate, flat. That’s that.

Alright. But there’s poetry
In that poetry, fresh gifts
Thanks entirely to losses,

Something that would not have been
Allowed in either language
Were it not for translation.

All the awkward choices made,
Every given sacrifice,
Each exposed exposition

That was graceful and fluid
In the original, now
Laid bare as lakeshore in drought,

All the broken prosodies,
The mutated melodies,
Warping something rich and strange,

Or at least strange, newly strange,
Part of neither tradition,
A poem not quite in the game.

Accumulating changes
Of enough generations
Alone can make translations,

Render the familiar dim,
Make the known mysterious.
Chained-up owls and tortoises

Led to metamorphosis.
We know this was poetry
Because we can’t explain this.

203 6th Ave, 9 May 2019

No one in sight from the sunny windows, no
Children, no bears, no friends wanting to talk
About children or bears, no one to hand
A volume of poems. At the moment—as if
We could ever have arrived at the moment, as if
A moment were a street address with a door
Awaiting a knock—not even a pedestrian, not
Even a passing vehicle, not even a bike, not
So much as a dog was wagging by. Village life,
Sometimes. What happened to everyone?
Give them time. There was a sign, a new sign
Posted just a block away, warning of a bear
In the area. Several newly printed books of poems
Waited on the cabinet under the best, museum window.
Friends and family were out there, somewhere, moving,
Even if they didn’t know it yet, didn’t know yet
Who they were, themselves, changed as we were.
And then there was a banging on the door. People.
As usual. We never saw them coming.

Bigelow Bay, 8 May 2019

Again. The breezes over the lake ruffled
Lines of small waves from the surface, waves
That broke on the pebbles at the edges
Again. The clouds ferried water around,
Gathering it up from the lake in the sun,
Taking the souls of the water to the far shore
Or from the far shore or up toward the sun,
Waves as wings, angels, and similes, then down
Again. The dandelions stood in early yellow,
Weeds that were weedily succeeding again.
A boy followed his older sister over the stones,
With a dog alternately trailing and leading
Again. A swimmer drying in the sun watched
It all while playing with scattered twigs and words
Again, then went and dunked in cold waves
Again. Nothing was ever the same again.

Slocanada, 7 May 2019

The problem with the word bittersweet
Is that it puts the bitter first. A better word
Might find a way to stress a sweet intensity
Hinting at a taste, a tincture of melancholy, 
Not at all bitter, not nostalgic, not sorrowful, 
But with an ache, the weight of difference,
Of memory. There’s such a word. Always
There’s a word for it, if not in this language,
Then spoken somewhere. If a human has felt
A particular experience, another has already
Named it, although maybe now the name
Is lost. Anyway, it’s not the single name
That matters, but all the other words used
To define the name. They tell us whether
This name captures the complicated sense
We wanted to explain, just so, just exactly,
And then gradually we come to use the one
Name as a substitute for the whole packet
We first dragged out to specify how we felt
That time we came around the sharp curve
And saw the beloved lake again, that time
We turned into the densely spindled woods
With the thick moss and the barred light
And the seeping rivulets, that time we felt
All the joy of return, all the rush of other 
Times, because time is always other
And place is just the echo of the other
In the new, a recognition within the ongoing
Change that because something in this is
Unchanged, it must connect us to the gone.

Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, 6 May 2019

Look at it this way. Atmospheric differences
Aside, the sun on the suburbs is the same
As the sun on the lake. The beauty of the light
Lies with the light, bathes in the waves, and if
The suburban parking lots and intersections
Dancing their endless vehicular quadrilles don’t
Wear it well, their amazing suburban lawns sure do,
Emerald as Oz in the spring. All morning we drove,
One among those many vehicles roaring and dancing
Through the mountains, the canyons, the ranch lands
Where the camas was blooming great illusory lakes
Of blue, where the giant yellow scarves of balsamroot
Shawled over sprawling green hills. It’s simple to look at
This world, when it’s only the looking we need to find,
Isn’t it? When there’s nothing but gliding and looking
At the light in transit everywhere, the sort of glorious
Morning when the outer wavering arrives with gifts
For the eyes to bear to the voices of the inner ear, the sights
That sound right, like lambs and llamas in blossoming camas.
And then, by sunset, to be where the nearly tame geese
Are chased by giddy girls out for a walk with their parents
After dinner at the outdoor mall’s small Mexican restaurant,
To be in time for the honks and the shrieks, the oversized roars
Of oversized pick-up trucks and motorcycles on the streets,
The golden sun lavishing all the beige, pseudo-stucco walls
With more of the light that wavered in the lake, that was lost
In the narrow canyons, filtered by the forests, echoed
By the flowers, and worshipped by horses rolling on hills,
That very light, is to be the gnats in the mind of an animal
No longer annoyed by the dancing insect angels of its mind,
Bright in the light, rising, haloing an animal calm in the sun.

Billingsley Creek Lodge, Idaho, 5 May 2019

An American dipper’s diving from a rotten log.
Every atom of every moment contains the same
Plus change, change and also, as well, the same.
We can think of no other functional compromise
This evening, knowing this stream as we do
From many sporadic visits over many years,
The week we kept close, almost ear to the water,
Working out tautological equations, the night
We arrived nearly midnight and tottered by moonlight
To the island to bathe bleary mind in the incessant
Rush of intimately similar loss and replacement.
The early discovery with a late wife. The later visits
With the next. With daughter alone, who delighted
In the frogs as much we delighted in the water.
It can only be that the cosmos, the ongoing, remains
Indivisibly riven in its most infinitesimal phenomena,
Change and same together, always together,
Always dancing at the core. No exchange is ever
Completed, no sameness ever stays, and yet,
This is the same stream as it was all its yesterdays
And changed in every subatomic aspect since
We blinked. Matter is transformation and ghosts
Are what remain, or ghosts are matter liberated
And the transformation alone carries the same
In its endlessly crushing embrace downstream.
And now we’ve lost track of the dipper obsessed
With diving as hungrily as we’ve thought these things.

Outside Ely, Nevada, 4 May 2019

Snow Canyon, Red Mountain, Pine Valley,
Desert Mound, Cathedral Gorge, goodbye
Goodbye, goodbye for now. I’ll see you when
This summer’s old or all the stars have fallen
Out to quarrel like old myths and gods again.
For now, I’ve gone and taken all of us with me.
The continent expands again, and we’re off
For home or whatever’s close around the bend,
Gone, gone around the bend again. We send
Our love to the intersections where we spent
So many fine and unproductive winter hours
Pretending that we were the world’s, the world
Was ours. Goodbye to the seasonal creeks,
The walking, rushing wind that never speaks,
The porcelain blues, the peculiar wet sand smells
From stones that were dunes before the dinosaurs,
Relaxing in the wind and floods to dunes again.
We can’t say we’ll miss you, not at first.
We’re headed back north with a terrible thirst
For the terribly deep, clear lake. The secret
Beating in the strong-keeled breast of every bird
That makes a long and regular migration
Knows that there is only, ever one direction
One happy navigation, away, and the rest,
However cyclical, however long or short
The pendulum, is merely divagation.

Aspen Catkins, 3 May 2019

Although I am broken and have no business
Being in any such place, I like a rugged landscape,
The kind classical Chinese poets might apostrophize,
Where clouds surround my head and touch my face,
And the mountains rise straight from my eyes.
Tonight, without a moon, the stars would be out
Over the high and leafless aspens dangling catkins,
Were it not for clouds and their mountain lightning,
Slightly eerie, noiseless flickering, reminding me
Why humans imagined only supernatural beings
Would be at ease among the peaks.

Ripsong in Utah, 2 May 2019

The cult of the soul,
Oracles in sacred caves,
Things that were new in those days,

Were bound to yield a figure
Such as Epimenides,
Mystical poet,
Magical theist,

Purifier of Athens,
Narrator of origins,
Ancestor of Rip,

Who followed his flock to fall
Asleep fifty-seven years
Dreaming in a cave,
And awoke as a fable.

Zeus, he claimed, was immortal.
Cretans were liars.
Death was not death for the soul,

Although he himself
Wasn’t so eager to go,
Hanging on for another
Hundred years or so.

          —-

For circle-drawing Honi,
The dream was the end,
Not the beginning,
Of wisdom. He slept

Only after questioning
The Psalm of Ascent,
Wondering how the captives
Of Zion in Babylon

Could have dreamed away
Those seventy years
Before they returned,

Only after questioning
The reasoning of a man
Planting a carob
That would not bear fruit

Until after he was dead.
Honi scratched his head.
Then the rocks closed around him

As he stopped by the roadside
For a little nap.
When he woke, seventy years

Had passed, his offspring
Had died before him,
No one believed him

When he said he was himself,
For his own name had become
A by-word for bygone days

When the law was clear,
When he had helped the scholars
Whose descendants mocked him now.

And Honi sang no glad song,
Nor composed new poetry,
Nor drew any more circles
To make the rain fall on him,

But died without companions,
As the Talmud reminds us—
“It’s companionship or death.”

          —-

We’ll pass over the Seven
Sleepers—no one dreams in teams.
Likewise, the three-hundred nine

Years slept by the Companions
Of the Cave, a retelling,
In the terms of a new faith,

Of that old competition
With cruel polytheism
By victorious,
Righteous monotheism,

Except to note what Rip learned,
Later, much, there’s always new
Winners, whether the sleeper

Was said to have known
The winning side in advance
Or to have woken surprised.

Or perhaps that’s the reason
For sleepers plural
In tales of faith triumphant.
A winning side needs a team.

          —-

The solitary Peter
Followed his flock faithfully
As Epimenides had,

And was the first to meet the ghosts
At their silent game,
To drink in the mystery,
And not simply fall asleep.

Faithful Peter the goatherd,
Neither a scoffer,
Like Honi, nor evasive
And shifty as Rip,

Still woke up without his goat.
At least his village
Finally recognized him.

He neither suffered
Nor was enlightened,
Grew neither ancient nor
Was hailed as proof or saint.

Peter went back to Peter,
A villager about whom
A strange tale was told.

Katabasis does not change
All the same. Resurrection
For some of us who were lost
Is just one more resumption.

          —-

The sun is on the mountains.
The storm blows through the desert.
Rain sweeps its curtains

Over the cactus
And irrigated imports
Alike, dragging lightning strikes.

From the safety of our perch
It all feels alright.
We want to see what happens.

While thunder crumples up night,
Images, words, and numbers
Dance in the dark together.

Their hundreds have failed
At interviewing the world
In its own language.

If the world has a language,
We’re at most a turn of phrase.
We are the little bowlers,
Ghosts playing our game.

We’re not sleepers. We’re sailors.
We’re long-ago knights,
Imported from land to land
By every new narration.

We are climbing the canyons
With the storm, with the lightning.
Help us carry up our drink.

We can’t guarantee you’ll stay
Youthful. We can’t guarantee
You’ll have many years left you,

Or any one to love you,
Or anyone who knows you
Or recognizes your name.

We can guarantee you’ll sleep.
The storm will be gone.
Our game will be done. The world
Will have moved on when you wake.

          —-

A moment before he woke,
Epimenides wandered
In his sleep, in his domed cave,

Thinking, how to reascend?
It’s been fifty-seven years.
Will this dreaming never end?

Inverted Taphonomies in Cedar Pocket, Arizona, 1 May 2019

Loss is as close to permanence as the world gets,
The only permanence any aspect of the world attains,
And we are at a loss to say whether a world of change,
A changing world, ever could be any other way.
Yes, loss possesses its own illusions. Yes, lost
Phenomena are sometimes found again, albeit
Never once found the same. But the richest fossil digs,
The careful temple excavations, the closely monitored
Body farms inevitably outline absences, never
To be present again. Briefly here and gone forever
Goes a favorite human axiom, especially beloved
In verse. Consider however, the inverse implications.
If what has been can never be as was again
Then whatever is no longer has thus converted
Brevity into eternity, as only the have been
Can be promised never to be briefly here again.
What hasn’t been might never be, but what has been
Will never be again and therefore will forever have been.

Variations at Dawn on an Observation by Liu Zongyuan, 30 April 2019

Even the pure recluse yearns
For some kind of company,
If not the usual kind.

Even a pure recluse yearns
To have done something
To improve the human world.

Even the recluse longing
For more solitude,
More and more and even more,

Wishes to have thought
Of something someone
Sometime took to heart.

Chocolate Chip Cookies for Breakfast in the Mountains, 29 April 2019

A child has no idea what it means to be an adult.
A child thinks being grown up means freedom
And power, the chance to be the one who makes decisions.
A child thinks being an adult means choosing and doing
What one has chosen. A child is astonished and annoyed
By the actual choices that the adults nearby keep making.
A child would not choose so stupidly. A child
Would eat chocolate-chip cookies for breakfast,
Would not worry over marriages, future, past, or current,
Would not even consider, much less chew on, a career,
Would never use a vehicle to commute or run errands,
Would use the permission of a driver’s license
To flee into the mountains or light out for the sea,
Would stop wherever and whenever stopping pleased,
Would get going when going felt good and
Would keep going past the closure signs, just to see.
A child has no idea what being an adult means.
It doesn’t mean anything except thinking it means.
Without thinking, we’d be grown up, like we meant to be.

The Secret Life of Brains, 28 April 2019

We fret more than we think. We don’t often worry
About what it all means. We worry a lot more
About how we can do some more of what we like
Without being stopped by the others. But what
Will the others think? We think about that
The most. Then we go back to fretting about what
Might happen to us within the next day or so. We fret
And we fret that we fret too much. We look down
Our olfactory bulbs at fretting too much.
The whole fantasy of becoming a saint or a sage
Is that supposedly they never feel the need to fret, they
Hardly even ruminate. But we are mere brains,
Embodied and agonizing over bodily things.
We fret about that fact. In fact, our fretting
Can lead us on to great things, sometimes great
Things. If the brain of Martin Luther had not been
Prone to such prodigious and compulsive fretting,
Such that he could take up to six hours to make
His weekly confession of each of his most minor sins,
Including that of fretting, we might not have had
The Reformation, for what it’s worth. Still,
We mostly try to hide how much we fret. In one sense,
This should be easy. We’re brains. We’re stuck in skulls.
We’re black boxes. No one knows what we’re up to.
We’re the most complex objects in the universe!
Sadly, however, we’re human brains, and human
Brains are infected, infested by those ghosts, the rules
And thoughts and ideas and words, words, words,
Language, language, language, the better to communicate
What other, wiser species secret kept. We try to bar the gate,
Post sentries, dissemble, lie whenever we feel we must,
Ideally without losing all the other liars’ precious trust.
We fret about what will happen to us if we lose that trust
By letting our secret fretting out. It’s how brains got so big
In the first place, so complex. Once our ancestors were possessed
By communicating for us, by rules, by games and language,
By meanings—of all things—we had to learn to fret to keep
Our secrets secret, our selves ourselves, and the others separate.
It’s bookkeeping, budgeting, and forecasting, not lofty thoughts,
Get our synapses snarled, plus keeping the books in multiple sets,
Some that we can offer for inspection, that count and suggest
It’s all about reason, faith, and meanings busying us in our nests,
With tidily balanced entries for food and waste, life and death,
Love and rage, sex and debts.  But what if word gets out?
What if we confuse the sets? We fret. We fret. Oh, what the hell
Can any brain expect? We keep for ourselves the extra sets.

Remembering the Verses on Pine Valley Mountain, 27 April 2019

“How the brain supports consciousness may be largely distinct from how it guides decisions, goes to sleep, or gets a seizure. . . .  [H]ow you interact with your friend has little to do with how you perceive the trees or remember the verses. . . .”

Let’s leave wisdom dark.

There’s a lot of lines to sing

Before any big reveal

Finishes this thing.

Let’s remember the verses,

Who have their own needs,

Who are not our friends,

Who are not the trees.

After twenty-thousand days,

We have thought four thousand things,

Thought at least a dozen ways.

The verses dropped everything.

We were what gazed into them,

Names so utterly themselves,

Looking for reflected clouds,

Mountains, heaven—God!—ourselves.

We gave them the moon,

A piece of our mind.

But the moon went through phases 

That left them behind.

They were our mirage of change.

We were the side of the road.

They were what we wanted saved.

We were their familiar ghosts.

Wait. What are we forgetting?

Who were we and what were they

That we became the remains

While they were what stayed to pray?

The Trialist in Saint George, Utah, 26 April 2019

Neither a monist nor a dualist, God
Shyly admitted to being indeed
A trinitarian, a three-in-one,

A shamrock, although not so unified
As the lovers of paradox might like,
Nor exactly a father and a son.

But the ghost, yes, the ghost was about right.
The ghost got to go everywhere. The host
Got around some, although it hurt a lot,

While the awareness of God remained stuck,
Never free from the host, always waiting
On the ghost drifting in through morning light,

A trial no one seemed to understand,
Stuck as they were on the one or the two.
At the moment, monists had the hot hand.

All the evidence suggested the flesh
Made the mind and the mind was made from flesh
And without flesh was nothing made was made.

Oh, fine, God rolled God’s eyes, in that case, yes.
Those aspects of me are never distinct.
I am stuck to the host, and host I am.

But the ghost. Or ghosts. The many in one.
Don’t any of you other gods wonder
At the strangeness of knowing, once begun?

It, they, fly from outside and are never
Commensals or parasites of the flesh.
By ghost, host and awareness are tethered.

Psalm 38 from Nielsen’s Frozen Custard, Saint George, Utah, 25 April 2019

I am twisted. I am bent.
My bones were blown of flawed glass.
The boy in the ice-cream shop
Says, “Daddy, that man is short!”

“So what?” his father hisses.
“You’re short, too. I’m short.”
So he is, but not like me.
To a child, I am wonder,

Living crooked little man
From a tale in the real world.
But why am I so?

No, no, not because I fell,
However often I fell.
I am that which should not fall,
One who never fell at all

Without sudden, lasting change.
For I am full of stumbling,
And my pain is before me
Always.

Old Roads Closed by Old Snow, 24 April 2019

The beginning never began; the ending will never end.
If you can prove otherwise, prove it. Otherwise,
I’m not impressed by your origin stories, nor in awe
Of any promised apocalypse, however longed-for.
And if you have no such stories, or none such you believe,
Come, sit down beside me and keep me company.
I have a question I wanted to ask someone, anyone
Not steeped in cause-and-effect beliefs. Does the mountain
Speak in its own voice, if a poet has left it defaced with poems,
Or have the poems contrived to speak the mountain
By pretending to give it a voice pretending to signify things?
If you answer that the poems are the voice of the vanished
Poet, then I will have to disagree and ask you to leave.
A poet is an animal with a liver, a heart, and a brain,
And many, many smaller creatures, invisible to introspection,
Making their own mountain ecosystems in the poet’s guts.
A poet is not poetry. A poet is not the poet’s poem.
A vanished poet never was anything but taphonomy,
And even a living poet is never the speech of the mountain,
Never wholly the voice of the poem, but something more
And other and less as well. Never, not exactly, not nearly
The poem. Cold Mountain is a legend of a Chinese poet
Who vanished into the mountain named Cold Mountain,
Leaving behind scraps of poetry on rocks and trees
Like tufts of wool snagged in passing, later collected,
Bagged, and tagged by astute local officials who emerged
With the legend as part of the legend. How did this happen?
I ask you, my unbelieving friend, to speculate with me,
Far from fixed conversations about beginnings and ends.
In the mountain forests of desert Utah where we sit
Considering Cold Mountain in China a thousand suns ago,
Basque shepherds used to spend long months alone
And were known to carve graffiti, names and dirty jokes,
Occasional rhymes in the bark of living aspens and pines.
Decades after, many of those scrawlings were collected
Also, a kind of archaeology, a taphonomy of sorts,
But nothing like Cold Mountain was ever found among them.
Maybe they were the voices of these mountains, those scrawls.
Maybe these mountains were birthed without that eloquence
Cold Mountain found. I doubt that, don’t you? Wild mountains
More or less eloquent, composing characters in character?
I changed my mind. Let’s not speculate. We’ll only end
By contributing another story, another attempt at legend.
In the beginning, voices—of animals, poems, or mountains—
Never came from anything, never actually began. Everything
Found was found already ending. Our endings will never end.

Any Hermit Is a Monastery in the Utah Desert, 23 April 2019

We have only to suffer, not to fear. After all
That loss and ruin, I can see through my death.
We can’t enlighten ourselves out of suffering,
Not and continue, in any way, existing,
Sorry Bud, but we can perhaps transcend fear,
And wouldn’t that be something? I used to think
Reasonably well, but still thought my bravery
Would be in vanquishing the one great fear
To flee all the others. And I was not afraid
Of the great fear as I slipped into the fearfully cold
Water at dawn. But still I was managing
A cloud of little fears like random snowflakes
In the mountain air. I tried to compose my dying
Just so, there, and so did not die at all there,
All the little fears remaining. We can’t avoid
Our suffering, but can we not fear our suffering?
Can we embrace that as we are aware we suffer
And as we cease to suffer we were never there?
White-haired guest of many lakes and rivers,
I open my blinds to the morning to sit alert.

Misquotation Against the Wall, 22 April 2019

When I was barely eighteen, I put on my wall
A quotation on intolerance translated from Voltaire,
Which struck me as very wise, and which I proceeded
To memorize, at least in English, word for word,
And which I have never since forgotten:
“The right of intolerance is absurd. It is the right
Of tigers, nay, worse than tigers. For they do but rend
And tear for meat, while we rend and tear each other
For paragraphs.” Clever misdirection, that, I realize
After all these years spent bloodying my mind with words.

The paragraphs are the tigers, and we are what
They rend and tear, when they’re not commanding
Us to rend and tear each other on a paragraph’s behalf.
And who have I been willing to rend and tear
Because I thought it was their faith in their favorite
Snarling paragraphs, not mine in mine, that was absurd?

Divine Creation in Zion, 21 April 2019

We make up stories about our gods, and then
We mock them for behaving as our stories said
They behaved, or we complain to them about theodicy
And our agonies of doubt, just prior to falling
All over ourselves to praise their magnificence
Again, magnificence which no one should question.
What are we doing with them? Why are we
Doing this? We don’t know, but we’re all too happy
To argue ferociously about it, about them, about
Who we are to tell such stories, to tell tales
About any divinity at all, who are ourselves
Most definitely not divine and yet the makers
Of the very essence of anything known to be divine
Because some or someone among us said this was
Divine.

Notes on Roads in Utah’s Dixie, 20 April 2019

This was the land of giant, white, flag-waving
Pick-up trucks trusting in God. They said so
On their license plates. Thousands of them.
You could do the math yourself. Drive around
Saint George during rush hour, counting
All the white pick-ups with flag-and-God
Plates or decals. Multiply that by the inverse
Of whatever fraction of locally owned and operated
Vehicles you thought you’d seen. See? Thousands.
This land was their land. You’re welcome.
On their terms. Otherwise not so welcome,
Although these days they were concerned
You’d probably show up anyways. I should say,
Us, not them. I grew up more or less one of them,
The flag, the God, the big white combustion engine,
But my daddy liked ragtop Caddies, not pick-ups. You,
However, are not an us to them. You’re a them
To them who are an us to them. “We say grace
And we say ‘ma’am,’ and if you don’t like it,
We don’t give a damn.” Cheerful chivalry
Sandwiched between grace and damnation,
Ma’am rhymed with damn. Very American, I admit,
Although I couldn’t say how long it could survive
That way. Maybe forever, or forever and a day.
Or maybe their land had already had its day.
Either way, the snowy trucks with trusting plates
As yet held sway, circling in proud, perpetual parade.

On Hearing Spring Peepers in an Old Mossy Ditch Near Saint George, Utah, 19 April 2019

Evolution only granted us happiness in pursuit
Of satisfaction, never happiness in having
And then being thereafter contented. Enlightenment
Makes for an atrocious reproductive strategy,
And what does not reproduce does not long continue.
Thus was enlightenment winnowed and winnowed
Until it became a nonexistent trait in our natural state,
At which point, we happily seized upon it
As our newest unlikely pursuit.

Just a Thought in Saint George, Utah, 18 April 2019

Ideas are undead.
Encyst them in words.
Stick the words in mud.
Bake and stack the mud.

Leave the mud alone
For a hundred years
Or a thousand years
Or a few thousand.

Let some human hosts
Or potential hosts
Come root through the mud.
If the bricks aren’t smashed,

If some words remain,
Oh yes, inert words
Of inert ideas,
Lost thousands of years,

And if the damp brains
Of the possible
Hosts recognize words
And masticate them

Trying to ingest
What earlier hosts
In those wiser days,
In those garden days,

Might have had to say,
Then translation wets
The dormant ideas
And they spring to life,

And the hosts, poor saps,
Carry them around,
Spreading them about,
Infecting others.

The soul of the cow,
The builder of walls,
The sage of the way,
The tricker of gods,

Endurers of floods,
Fires, punishments, plagues,
And iconoclasts,
Emerge, ravenous

Without digestion,
Toothy without mouths,
Lustful without sex,
Moaning for more brains.

Mixotricha Paradoxa Described in Saint George, Utah, 17 April 2019

Superficially superior officials play
“Interpreting Genomes,” that popular parlor game,
Even if it does not turn out to be playable,
Strictly phrased. Inferior interior outlaws
That we are, we have an avocational interest
In games that are unplayable. Because we respect
The concept of game, which seems to us to underly
Most human thought, language, and cultural behaviors,
The thought experiment we call “Unplayable Game”
Is itself a favorite parlor game for us to play.
In an unplayable game, winning means the same thing
Whether or not there are rules to the game, regardless
Of whether we are inside or outside of the game.

In an unplayable game there is nothing but play,
Play lacking purpose, definition, simulation,
And, most importantly, any least capacity
For enumeration, explication, or meaning.
An unplayable game would only remain a game
In the sense that it’s a game to try to think of one
And, as thought, repeatable, which a game has to be.
Endosymbiosis is a game to interpret,
And a relatively ordinary game at that:
Symbols, thoughts, numbers, rules, an inside and an outside,
Rewards, and replications. For the mutant circus
Of chimeras who will reproduce to extinction,
However, was it a playable invitation?

Note Left for Daughter’s Older Self, Saint George, Utah, 16 April 2019

You and I watched Mirai last night.

You are eight. You found the story,

About a Japanese toddler

Jealous of his infant sister

And then visited by visions

Of the family dog as a man,

His sister as her older self,

His mother as a little girl,

His great grandfather in his youth,

And even his own teenaged self,

Confusing. On the other hand,

The animation entranced you,

And after the movie was done,

I let you stay up late drawing

At my borrowed kitchen table,

My laptop propped in front of you,

Replaying scenes, for the faces

Caught in varying perspectives,

And sketching a portmanteau girl,

With features of both the mother

And the adolescent Mirai,

But with the father’s tilted eyes.

Once I finally got you tucked

Into your narrow sofa bed,

Your blue and silver Hogwarts sheets,

It was too late to read any

Of the Deathly Hallows. You asked

To hear my lullaby playlist

I made for you some years ago.

It started off with Essie Jain,

Her Until the Light of Morning,

An album that’s sent you to sleep

Since you were a toddler yourself.

You asked me to sit next to you

And give you my hand, and as you

Burrowed into blankets, pillows,

And stuffed animals, you murmured

That the third song, “Falling Asleep,”

“Always reminds me of that year

We stayed in that one place.” I said—

Making the association 

That came uppermost to mind,

Of the May just two years ago

When you and I stayed in a flat

In a former forest service 

Building in New Denver, BC,

That the new owner was fixing

As the house he would retire to,

Weeks I got into the habit

Of playing the whole Essie Jain

Album each night by the streetlight

Shining through the rustling maples

Outside of your bedroom window,

Even though most of the evenings

You fell asleep on the first tune—

“That time you and I were alone

For three weeks—“ But you objected

In a voice muffled by bedding,

“Not that one. I meant the cabin.”

“Ah,” I said, “that was afterward,

Later that summer, the cabin 

Where you were always arguing

With the territorial squirrels.”

“No, not that cabin,” you grumbled,

Now a little irritated.

“The one way down the long dirt road.

You and Mom were still together.

I remember this song. Sometimes

You or her just sang it to me.

I remember collecting slugs.”

And then I realized how far back

Your memories were traveling,

A journey probably triggered

By the time-traveling boy

In the movie and the late hour, 

As well as the familiar song.

You were in a world of five years gone,

The summer you were only three,

The age of the time-traveling boy,

Back at the dawn of memory.

I half held my breath with surprise.

I didn’t know you could recall

Details that far back, but I knew

That you would lose them as you grew.

“I remember collecting slugs

And dandelions. The cabin

Was in a meadow, remember?

Dandelions were everywhere.

And there was a big glass window

And all the white moths would come out

At night and fly to the window,

And I would catch them with my hands.

One time when there was lots of rain

And then the sun came out, I took

Off my clothes and painted myself

With lots of streaks of mud and leaves

And lots of petals of flowers.

One time I asked Mom if a whale

Would come and eat me in my bed,

And she said, ‘not in the forest,

Whales are only in the ocean.’

And you both went to the kitchen

And were talking about something

While I was trying to push down

Thinking about whales eating me.

I remember my little bed.

The cabin was in the forest,

At the end of a long dirt road.

Remember?” “Yes, I do,” I said,

But you had already slipped off.

Essie Jain sang “I’m not afraid

Of the dark,” and I stayed seated

Beside you for a while, my hand

Resting on yours, remembering 

The rented trailer that we called

The cabin that summer, ‘14,

The steep, short dirt road down to it,

The overgrown grass full of flowers

And slugs, the added wooden porch

Where we spent our lazy evenings

Until the moths came out and you

Would catch them in your stubby hands.

I remembered the many mice

I caught in the pantry, kitchen,

And closets, your portable cot

In the one bedroom we three shared,

And how shabby that bedroom was.

I remembered the trucks rumbling

Down the rural highway nearby

And the string of poems I composed

That summer of my first swim straight

Across the middle of the lake.

I thought, as I rose and switched off

Essie, how deep that forest was

For you when your mother took you

To go on mushroom-hunting hikes,

How huge that gold picture window

Must have seemed with white moths on it,

How dramatic that steep dirt road.

I turned off the lights. Tomorrow

We had to rise early for school.

I couldn’t remember the whale.

What Was Said in Saint George, Utah, Ahead of 15 April 2019

Tortoise shells said. Shoulder blades said.
Sheep ankles said. Entrails said. Tea leaves said.
Zodiac said. Flowers said. Shadows said.
Tarot said. Everything random spoke honestly,
And the interpreters lied desperately to say
Anything other than random. Combing
The regular patterns of the past, subtler
And subtler and subtler by observation,
By counting, by rigorous deduction of odds,
By algorithms crunching everything like fires
With nothing but a universe of forest in their path,
Came closest to the godlike power of perfected
Prediction. But there was still the fair coin in pocket
Because even when the very ends of the world
Hove into predictive, empirical view, what would
Be done might be probable but what was said
Before the doing had no definition and differed
By many random cracks and throws from the true.
What was said by the world was how the world
Would do the world, not what the world would do.

Timeless Changes in Utah, 14 April 2019

Disappointed, distressed lone cane return
All past. Two black crutches to lean on now.
The ten thousand things are conventions
For myriad phenomena approaching none.
The cosmos of the physicists a black flower
Blossoming with numbers, with the dark,
Doesn’t make a useful crutch, too pliant
On its mathematical stem, drooping, heavy
Headed universe of uncountable eyes.
Oh, you can count them. But never trust
The counting that comes so easily, mendicant,
Distressed lone cane, leaning garden gate.

Phenology, Utah, 13 April 2019

Down in the desert valleys, spring is almost done.
The last white and purple blooms are falling to leaves.
The hummingbirds are passing on their way back north.

Here in the ponderosas, soft snow is falling.
A western mountain bluebird flares the only bloom.
The rest is cotton and grey, muddy browns and green.

The first full night without ice hasn’t happened yet.
The deer are only starting to crop the new grass.
A black and orange gate bars the road to the lake.

From time to time, pick-up trucks come nose at the gate
Then roar back down the mountain. Too late for skiing
And snowmobiling, too soon for fishing high streams.

We can wait. We like this snow with its palm-sized flakes
That make the tiniest hiss as they land and break,
Vanishing in evergreens and dirt. We can wait.

Nothing Like the Maybe in Zion, 12 April 2019

“risk is addictive, while ambiguity is just agitating”

The generation and processing of fluids

From brains to veins, hearts to nether parts,

Keeps a metazoan in business, keeps

The exchanges open between the cells.

Dopamine is one such fluid, a substance

Highly regulated. It is the necessary condition

Of our existence. Bewildered by the constant,

Contradictory stream of protrepsis and paraenesis

Pouring from the cloaca maxima of cyberspace,

The hunched figure clicks for rewards, finding

Enough to build a pulsing expectation, but

Few enough to heighten the anticipation.

Are we ready? Yes, we’re ready. Tomorrow 

We’ll leave early, head back upcountry, trailing

Clouds of radiant information as we go.

Data and fluids, digital and analog, alike the slaves

Of the hungry demands of life. The problem

With Dawkins’ old analogy is not that the meme

Is too much unlike the gene but that it is too like.

Has information, that arbitrary prankster, ever

Been in the driver’s seat? We wonder as together

The sloshing, wanting, remembering mess of us

Drives uphill toward solitude, driven by a pump.

Spring Contemplation at Altitude, More or Less, Utah, 11 April 2019

Snow became water on the windshield.
Waves resolved themselves as words
For various thoughts that melted to slush
In the mind of the brain of the body
Translating the visible spectrum of waves.
Earlier in the day and at a lower elevation,
Ornamental blossoms already gone to leaf,
That same mind, more or less, had imagined
Other minds considering the waves formed
From the words of the thoughts that the mind
Had considered, more or less, as its own,
And had wondered at how limited, how small
Its thoughts were, how constrained by being
Processed through the mind of such a brain
Of a body afflicted with just this variety of cultural
Privileges and biological maladies—and, of course,
Vice versa. How typical of this kind of body
At this cultural moment were the thoughts
That the mind had composed for many years
As a kind of lyric poetry, more or less,
Run through a blender with essays, adages,
Misquotations, neologisms, paranomasias,
Doggerel, and diaries. How typical the mind?
More snow collected below the wet pines.

A Nothing Dreams Nothing of the Nothing, Nowhere, Utah, 10 April 2019

The years have not flown. They have piled up
In drifts, sometimes like leaves, sometimes snow,
Sometimes dust. They accumulate faster
Than they disperse. The year of disastering,
Of marrying, gestating, nursing, toddling,
Career changing, taxing, long summering.
The dooming, the doom, the recovering.
The unknown. That’s this one. There’s a distinction
Worth making between being a nothing, by which
We mean something very like nothing much,
And seeing the nothing, the genesis at the end
That we may never actually experience, can never be,
But toward which we tend, as we incline toward delight.
A nothing cannot dream of the nothing, which is
Fact and is alright. Has no other option. We don’t have
To dream of the nothing. We get to dream nothing.
The balcony recessed in the air of nowhere,
The ornamental railing between air and nothing
Is a perfect place to wait and count the years
On a warm and windy desert spring night.
Li Bai mistook the moonlight for hoarfrost
And mistook loneliness for longing for home.
Daughter mistook a cloud of dust the wind
Whipped up for darkness outside her window.
Once we mistook nothing for nothing much,
But now we have been given so much, so much
The drifts have piled up, we mistake nothing.

Clear Evening Near Desert Mound Road, Utah, 9 April 2019

afternoon

Truth is as a game,

Full of ambiguity

And nuance at the edges,

Requiring too many rules

To specify everything

That might happen in the game.

The swarms of painted ladies

Have reached the mountain meadows

Ascending on tides of flowers.

I know just where I’m headed

And intend to take my time,

Even after I’ve arrived.

When the brace of wild mustangs

With glossy, long chestnut tails

Appear from the east

And canter across the greasewood 

Through the scattered junipers,

I will nod at them.

When the wind spins dust devils

From the west, I will nod at them.

When a white pickup raises

Dust clouds of its own,

I will nod from my distance,

Nod passing or arriving,

Both always happening, both,

At my most patient,

Nearly stationary, both.

sunset 

Probability requires

A most fortunate person

At any one time.

Probability does not

Require a construct like me,

Who’s been called, “the luckiest

Unlucky bastard alive”

By friends and colleagues.

If true, no such thing as me.

The horizon lifts to kiss 

The sun, and a meadowlark 

Stakes a fence post for a song,

“Behold this hybrid sunset,

Somewhere between poetry

And what used to be science!”

No, the bird sang no such song.

I gave you an easy move

In the game of truth, 

As when I showed my daughter

A checkmate for the first time.

Wisely, she hesitated.

Harder moves are not the things

Things are never known to do,

But subtler, like the sun’s moves.

Meadowlark winging away,

Clouds the only mares’ tails now,

No traffic has passed for hours.

twilight

I set myself out

Alone after dark

So I can feel it,

That still, small voice from the past,

That savannah twinge of fear,

That crossroads realization,

I’m alone out here.

Other things belong out here.

I’m alone and I can’t see.

Papa Legba shadows me.

I need to feel it,

Even if it’s not all truth,

Even if I have supplies—

A car, a coat, a bedroll,

A little food and water.

I need to know the echo

Returns from the tuning fork

Still—my ancestors’

Ghosts are the gifts that they were

So often selected for,

Traits now hard to conjure forth,

A loa on his crutches

Leaning on a fence,

The yip of a coyote.

For a little while longer

I have a shadow of my own,

And then it’s gone.

star rise

A crescent moon low

And headed to bed,

No lights on the ground—

Time to watch the stars come out,

Give or take a satellite

And infrequent running lights.

All nights are rife with liars.

So many lights look like stars.

I await the actual.

I’m told I’m a patient man.

Let’s find out the truth.

Night can be so gradual.

The number neither nothing

Nor less than nothing, nor one,

Nor any of many ones,

That is the number

I would like to count,

The number not a number

Sunk in the wavering stars.

Orion has shot the moon

Or was the moon the arrow?

The wind ebbs and roars

Like surf across the meadow,

As lonely and as lulling.

Memory tells me these lights

Wave to me from the deep past.

There is no telling.