The People of the Waves Cower in the Mountains of Zion, 31 January 2019

Why submit if destruction remains guaranteed?
Between authority and anarchy stands argument,
Resisting and negotiating, insisting only words
Can catch words, only symbols symbols,
Only meanings meanings. The rest is noise,
Whether thundered from on high or rumbling
Up from below. Between heaven and the dragon,
Lightning and the earthquake, the superior force
That targets and the writhing chaos that erupts,
Weave messages, nothing much but messages.
Our sky gods are woven from messages, striking
Our serpentine monsters of uncoiling messages
With wave upon wave of messages, driving down
Leviathan, but never actually finishing the inchoate
Beast of many murmuring tongues that always returns,
Stronger. To this finite arrangement, never ending
In any final victory, resistance by the people
Of the waves, yes, is futile. But why hide, why
Surrender? The tyrant and the demon are both at bay,
Enchained by the complex negotiations of these waves,
Their more extreme exchanges of advantage tempered,
A kind of sustained, rolling victory, knowing neither
Authority nor anarchy can win until the whole
Arrangement ends, the whole ocean drains,
Until Judgment and Armageddon take all
Of divinity and deviltry, of sacred and profane,
Of God and creation out with them, every pattern
Cancelling. Submission and resistance together
At last, the final triumph of all this nothing much
Will be to finally arrive at nonexistence, nothing
Attained or to be attained, the final attainment.

Blown Glass Bone Harmonica Played by the Virgin River in Utah, 30 January 2019

The palps of the day spun past the flesh.
Feel the friction from the fingerprints of ghosts
Set vertebrae to spinning independently?
Sense the tunes shivering up through the neck.
Or don’t. Imperatives are nothing but dreck.
The manipulation continues, nonetheless.
The bones can be made to sing with soul
Never their own. The musicians of the spheres
Make a home of all moaning, wavering tones.

Juddzona, Arizona, 29 January 2019

Behind the counter of smokes and energy
Booster drinks at the auto shop, a flat screen,
Diagonally no bigger than half a yardstick,
Ran simulated pictures of exploding stars
As the clerk struggled to press the right icons
On the screen of her register and an addled
Young white man in worn ball cap and work boots
Tried to make charming small talk with her.
A clipped, Oxbridge accent enunciated
From the television’s tiny speakers. “Neutrons
From these dying stars are pouring through us
At every moment, unawares, as if we were not
Even there.” The clerk and the young man
Took no notice of the voice, but finally told each other
“Have a good one,” as two packs and a ticket
For a multimillion-dollar lottery jackpot changed
Hands, along with awkward glances, as if we,
As if the news of neutrons were not even there.

Sympathy for the Dragon, 28 January 2019

One could call it diabolically cruel that the one
Feature of life on which we can know we can
Count, count on absolutely, is the one feature
We most fear, would most love to be rid of, least
Want, but then again, it’s just the world at core,
So why try to ascribe it to only demons? Find
Yourself an actual dragon, cage yourself a demon,
Before you call any dark change an aberration.
As far as a dragon can tell, curled in its lair,
The brimstone smell in its feathery hair, the dark
Is a feature of the whole, belonging to no part.
The darkest part is the part that shames the dark.

Decisively Saint George, Utah, 27 January 2019

The most absurd aspect of ruminant human
Decision-making is not the final irrelevance
Of our decisions, not our delusion of choice
When making them, but the innate need,
The endlessly rumbling urge and hunger
To muse on them, even when we’re well aware
We don’t choose them so much as express them,
Even when we know they won’t make as much
Difference as we worry they’ll portend. Frost
Was teasing Edward Thomas when he composed
“The Road Not Taken,” and one can feel the latent
Sarcasm in the famous ending, but doubtless
Frost still worried over many of his own decisions.
Has any beast other than H. sapiens ever been
So compelled, if not to extended reasoning,
At least to so much hesitation? Tonight we may
Return to our apartment in Saint George. Tonight
We may spend with family in Zion Canyon.
We haven’t decided yet. Like a catnip-bemused
Kitten facing a catnip-infused phony rodent,
We can’t ignore the false necessity of decision.

Christ Sisyphus, 26 January, 2019

The same old sacrifice, same old spear
In the side, same katabatic visit, same
Harrowing, same ascent, again and again:
How many times does a god have to die
To save a single species given to lies
On one speck of ash caught in the skies?

Simple, Empty Things in the Corner of the World, 25 January 2019

The simple need to know
Never puts on a show.
It’s only once what’s known
Has already been shown
That knowers clap or moan,
And then they have to go.
They still desire to know.

To Furnish with a Mouth in Saint George, Utah, 24 January 2019

I wonder what will happen next?
The world has furnished me a song.
The words and I have memories
To make song thought, to sing along.

We have a pulse. We have a throat.
We have desire, like any life.
We want to get our song out there,
Strange as it is, sung like a knife,

Lacking a tune, borrowing beats,
Cut from the mind then carving south.
We can’t rip it out. Get it out.
God, someone furnish us a mouth.

Straw Bags of Salted Salmon, Saint George, Utah, 23 January 2019

Good things come in words. I’ll take four
Fragments of imagination, dished up
In translation, like a recipe, like separate items
To be reintroduced to each other and carted
Around in my ruminant mind. Straw. Bag.
Salt. Salmon. All together now. I can almost
Feel the scratch of the straw, the weight
Of the bags loaded down, the taste of the salt
On the smell of the salmon, that rural salmon
Fresh from the wild, defeated but unspoiled, cut,
Preserved in the salt and the straw, like my thought.

The Vacuum Adores Its Nature On Not Yet 22 January 2019

The future, not predicted, imagined futures,

Not mathematical abstractions of futures

Swapped for pasts like beads on an abacus,

Just the future in the sense of a tomorrow,

Which is forever unhappened yet, that future

Is the absence, is the author of all hunger,

“Why we sail across relentless seas to plunder.”

Know this: because of that infinite not yet,

The backwards because that falsifies cause,

Phenomena continually emerge into being

And continually disappear. The whole mass

Of gravitational attraction is just the not yet.

Black holes are eddies on approach to the not

Yet. The nature of the future is the not yet

That conjures the is as always has been

From the never has been through to never was.

There is no end or beginning to the not yet,

Only being in the middle of what has happened,

For anything happening, always happening,

And only the unattainable never for not yet.

After Our Shadow Crossed the Moon, 21 January 2019

Let’s take a word and torture it. Take a poll
And pollard it. Take a whole and hollow it.
Take a swallow and swallow it, then a bomb,
Bombard it. Have you noticed how tortured
Words become so quickly foolish, as if
They’re not saying anything anymore? It is
Not surprising, given that tortured humans
Tend to babble on and thus torture hardly ever
Works. But there’s something worse at work.
When you start to take apart a beast, the beast
Begins to die. When you start to pick apart
The forms of meaning, meaning multiplies,
Runs off in all directions like spilled marbles,
And then the marbles hide. Scratch a poll
And just below the surface you’ll find ideas
Whose only words are numbers. Break
The bread of numbers and discover crumbs
Of merest words. The universe is up to something
With us and everything. Our universe is absurd.

In Praise of Pointless Dragons, Saint George, Utah, 20 January 2019

Finding ourselves in mythologies we find
Better mythologies for ourselves, for what’s
Often been expressed, but never well enough
Yet. Who seems more heroic to you, the amygdala
Or the prefrontal cortex? To what immortal
Are you both attracted and ashamed to confess?
Who can make you do the harder thing when
It’s the right thing to do? Whose story persuades
You that you secretly know there’s no right
Thing to do? On your deathbed, in all likelihood
You will have neither words nor regrets, and stories
Will have all flown away. But with your last
Moments of fiction, as yourself, as your myth
Of being a self with awareness of being, too tired
To speak, having difficulty breathing, wanting
To leave, wanting to sleep, you may see shining
The ash-eyed goddess or the bearded ferryman,
The benign messenger, the ogre guardian,
The apostle, the philosopher, the servant,
Or your sinking self, the doomed leviathan.

The Twin Patterns in the Great Chain, 19 January 2019

An infinite number of links, each distinct
From what immediately preceded it by
The least possible degree of difference,
What was once imagined as an unbroken
Chain reaching upward, literally, qualitatively
From dirt to heavenly divinity, what has since
Been reimagined as sinking down by layers
In the ground, or handed down generations
From deep time all the way to this moment
And us, is only living’s thread in the actual
Chain of being, not being, chain of change,
Nothing to nothing much, then back again.
What was sometimes thought of as a line,
Whatever the dimension it was traversing,
Was part of the fabric, same as the cosmos,
Every least aspect of it slightly different,
Every least aspect keeping similar remains.
That dualism is the monism, the real frame
Of the game, the embodied texture of ideas,
Nameless, unnameable source of the name.

The Necessity of Many Other Humans in Saint George, Utah, 18 January 2019

There’s an inherent bigotry to all forms
Of insecurity: no one I would want would
Want me. None of us want to belong
To clubs that might accept us unless we first
Accept the club. Groucho Marx made a good
Joke out of inverting this: I won’t belong
To any organization that would have me
As a member. He was a member, alright.
Alright, so why want anyone or anything?
Somewhere there’s one magical human being
Who is getting by without needing human beings.
Oh, no, there isn’t. But if, but if there could be,
Why wouldn’t a merciful cosmos let it be me?

Polytropos, 17 January 2019

Not even Odysseus was a man of as many
Shades as Charon, forever returning. Ferrying
Is oscillation, is time, is clockwork change,
The elliptical journey so often completed
It creates within its coils the fiction of a place.
Pick up the pole. Haul on the sails. Seize hold
Of the rudder. Whatever you have to master
To make it across. Even the daily toil of carrying
Souls, collecting the gold-leaf obols from under
Their lying tongues, has its misadventures,
Its storms. No one ever challenges the same
Styx, the same Acheron twice, not even
The deathless, not even the dead. It comes
With the territory. Ferries often sink. Only
Charon himself scrambles out of the wreckage
And swims. No afterlives for those twice-dead
Poems, only more work for him. Some nights
The rivers are oceans, some nights tunnels,
Some nights deserts or woods. He sinks
From sight, again and again. And then,
From mists, great scraggly beard as silvered
As the fog, he reappears. Time to cross over again.
You can spend your whole life traveling around
This round world, but in his grim, tight circuit
He nonetheless transcends your excursions,
Transits between worlds, links meanings
To meaninglessness, ends to unknowns,
Histories to eternities he will never begin.

Strictly Business, Saint George, 16 January 2019

We all suffer pareidolia, painting a face
On the cosmos, spotting figures in clouds
And constellations, expecting an answer
To our questions, even if not to our prayers.
Don’t make fun of Mother Theresa in a bun,
Holy Mother Mary glancing shyly from toast,
Not unless you’re willing to assume nothing
Of human nature inheres in the nonhuman,
That whatever you mean to the rest of us,
Your fellow breathing bipeds while we move
And judge each other, you moving among us,
There’s nothing personal in whatever occurs,
Nothing. This cosmos is strictly business.

Panaca Market, Nevada, 15 January 2019

All the lonely, interesting places I’ve been
That I never intended to visit. Weird and lonely,
Nights full of stars, days full of empty markets.
There’s plenty of room for humans, outside
Of human rules, outside of other humans,
But we can’t survive outside, even if a few
Of us make lives of pretending to live alone.
Here’s a skeleton key hanging from the outer wall
Of a shuttered store. Words crowd the thoughts
In towns as spacious as ancestors’ bones.

Extraterrestrial Highway, Nevada, 14 January 2018

Daughter is down in the tropics, discovering
Jellyfish, monkeys, and frogs, going hiking,
Going snorkeling, eating fish eyes, pretending
To be a beached mermaid. There’ll be none of that
Here. Here it is winter, sere and severe. Life
Consists of scattered free range cattle wandering
Into ice-rimmed roads, ravens scavenging, a hawk
Searching everywhere. Others may hike through
The Joshua trees, up into the scenic canyons,
But this body will not hike.  In any case,
Something weirder and more wonderful
Than lovely, lively nature’s on its way. Skies
Burst with strange activity, luminous objects
Born from dying stars, the brightest quasar
Ever seen, peculiar collections of lenses,
Nurseries, factories, an outburst so bright
It could be ejecta from a star being eaten
By a black hole aborning. Heavens, heavens,
What wet language we use for the heavenly.
From the side of the gravel road, deep
In one canyon past its ghost town with a cafe
Boarded up for decades, barely standing,
A curled cardboard OPEN sign in the window,
The twilight loses its blue and its purple,
And there are no lights below or high in flight
To take away from the night. No ships up there
Visible with living, edible eyes. Spare me.
You can spare me. You don’t need me.
I’m extra, leftover, pure surplus material,
A surplus terrestrial. Let them come down
And get me. Let them take me. Let me go.
Daughter is down in the tropics. Why not
Hitch a ride on a glow to visit her there?
But nothing comes down from the night
Except the various exploding lights, silent
From here. Body feels it, though. Body knows.
Something weirder and more wonderful
Than lively, lovely nature’s on its way. So stay.

Pipe Twilight, Caliente, Nevada, 13 January 2018

Oscillations permit the creation of time.
Cataclysmic cascades destroy oscillations.
The old oscillations vanish away forever.
New oscillations emerge from nonexistence.
These exchanges of kinds of change remain
Mysterious. This necessity for exchanging
Change remains insoluble. Dispensations,
The regimes of certain types of exchange,
Are exchanged for fresh dispensations. How
Is a dispensation of oscillating exchanges
Exchanged? Why is every kind of exchange
Replaced by a new kind of exchange? What
Are exchanges among all kinds of change?
In the gathering dark, the routine oscillation
Of an evening in the depths of desert winter,
Another familiar oscillation, familiar season,
A traveler lit a pipe for the first time in years,
Breathing through burning leaves, and knew
That the brief return of this old tradition
Signaled the end of the newer dispensation.
Ghosts only return to signal new ghosts
Are about to be made, new exchanges
Are about to begin, following the unseen
Cataclysmic cascade that has no reasons,
No maker, is not part of the season, leaving
Fresh worlds and new seasonal oscillations
In its wake. The wind pushed the dry leaves
From the few canyon trees over the feet
Of the traveler in search of a new exchange,
Sensing in this ordinary, remote evening
Nothing remotely ordinary about the coming
Change. Knock out the ashes. Not the gods,
Not the ghosts, not the probabilists, not
The priests nor the prophets know the need
Of change to resist completion, to exchange.

Broken Angels, Glasgow 1995, Saint George 2019

There’s too much time in the mean, ordinary,
Even somewhat shorter than ordinary
Human life, too much clock. Not in the tragic,
No, of course not, not in the tragically short.
But still, it’s painful, it aches in the most, the great,
Sagging void, the wasteland of remembering
That memory has to stagger across, to recapture
The few of so many millions of moments across
So many days, reaching into thousands, reaching
Into decades. My friend died young, too young.
My friend is almost two years gone. But, friends,
When I summon to sessions of thick, silent thought,
After many wanderings, many years of absence,
The picture of the one-legged angel in the cemetery
That he gave as a gift to me, bizarre tchotchke,
It stuns me that he and I lived so long across
The vast swoon of experience intervening,
And we were nobodies, both nobody, broken
Angels striding and disintegrating. He told me
When he returned to the cemetery the next year
The acidic air of the industrial city had completed
Its wear and tear, and the whole stone angel
Had toppled from its last broken ankle. Beware.

Line of Dawn Over Zion Before Dawn, 11 January 2019

Life is short and Art is long, went the old song.
How typical of Art to sing such a thing. Life
Was the dark forest inhabited by Art. Art was
The dark forest mesmerizing Life. Life was
The scrap of Life that Art persuaded was one.
And if Life was singular, a singular beast, then,
Yes, in that beast, as that beast, Life was
Short. Art, which could wing like a bird between
The beastly forests, seemed longer. But if Life
We’re parsed by Art as Life itself, then no. Life
Was burning, hungering, eating and mating itself
Long, long before anything arrived in it like Art.
It was apples and oranges, the Tree of Art
And the Tree of Life. It was snakes and ladders,
Yearning and mythology, hosts and parasites,
And who would say because some parasites
Escaped each dying host to invade another
That hosts were brief and parasites enduring?
No hosts, no parasites, and the turnover
In the forest of the host has always been
Many brief forests of parasites. Art is short
And recenter than Life. But Art has a point. Art
Is momentary in the host, but in the moment
It is immortal. So wrote the host shedding
Spores of imported words from poems’ canopic
Portals. Life, as Art knew it, began with Art, and
Neither ends without the other. Death chortled.

Down by the River Unseen, 10 January 2019

We considered ourselves. We read about us.
We read more of us. We ripped and copied
And carried a considerable variety of us
Out into the sun and spread ourselves out
On the sandy bank. Considering all we had
Of examples of all we were, we decided we
Were only of interest to ourselves two ways,
At least as us, not as the story arrow shot
Through the guts of us. First, was heft,
The cumulative power of masses of us when
Driving toward one inescapable conclusion.
Second, there was surprise, the apt surprise.
We squinted in the winter sun, we, the many,
Multiplying crows feet of us sinking in sand.
The river sank below its banks. It was best,
We decided, to gather our fragments together,
Our damp impressions, our scratched hides,
Our linens, our acidic leaves and sheafs,
And ball it all up. Ball it all up and hope
Our sodden weight held together as we crashed
Into the invisible water and did not dissolve,
A surprise that would make up for our lack
Of little surprising staircases built within ourselves.

We Hang in the Balance of Nothing and Everything, Driving to Las Vegas, 9 January 2019

Will this happen? Will this poem predict?
It’s not science, you know. It’s not statistics.
If it’s prophecy, then it’s good and pathetic,
And nothing it says will come to pass. Prophets
Are the worst at extrapolating from the past.
Let’s roll with it. The car will start. The family
Will arrive in parts, as planned, and coalesce.
The trip will commence. The car will crawl
Through the airport’s parking mall. The agents
Of the federal government, working without pay
These days, will wave those through who saved
This date for going through, while those
Who remain, without going through, will wave
Farewell and safe home from behind forbidding gates.
God, this could be anything. This could be
Any family, any trip, any farewell, any day.

Left in Pine Mountain, Utah, 8 January 2019

I woke in a dark wood, and my first thought
Was not, “I’m lost,” or “Please rescue me.”
My first thought was, “Aren’t dark woods
Trivial and mostly either second-growth or
Groomed tree farms these days?” But I was
Wrong to mock. I was thinking of trees. These
Were not exactly the same as trees. Nothing
Is exactly the same in a cosmos always
Begging, “Trust me. Please.” But that’s not
What I mean. These were things like trees
But, unlike trees, these were things that mean,
That can’t help meaning. The significance
Of them, meaning everything, rose up around,
And it became clear to me in the forested dark,
Stars peeking through the leaves, “Keep wandering.
There’s more to dreams than memories.” Leaves.

Tempest in a Cafe, Hurricane, Utah, 7 January 2019

Today the weird, grey beauty of a wintry, wet desert,
Of bare, dark boulders and of scrubby, drab vegetation
Glistening with rain. Sit inside with a teacup
And a view from the cafe and consider it,
Among a couple dozen strangers with their own
Sandwiches, soups, and cups. “All they do is lovely,
And tea leaves circle in their cups like hawks
Above the valley.” Hawk in the actual valley below us,
Gliding down past the black lava rocks, the shuttered,
Sulfuric hot springs, the creosote and rabbit brush,
Vanishing grey and glistening with rain.

When Anstapa Banhus Went Searching for an Old Friend and Found Only an Obituary, 6 January 2019

Everyone gets a number, from zero
To a hundred and twenty, although few
Get anything over ninety. My late wife, Paula,
Got 45. My good friend James recently drew 53.
One grandfather was handed 85, the other 44.
My father ended up with 67, mother 84.
I will not get anything lower than 56, for sure.
Jeanne Calment got 122, although she’s viewed
With some suspicion. Maybe she drew 99.
Not everyone gets a number, actually. Numbers
Are fantasies, carefully monitored, liberally strewn
About, like seeds, but really only faeries
That happen to appear to inhere in everything.
Still, since we’re counting, since we’ve been
Counting for countable centuries, admit we’ve learned
That the numbers we used to favor for heroes
And ancestors, numbers like 900 or more,
Weren’t ever really meant for us. If we want
Bigger numbers, we need smaller units,
Littler divisions, arbitrary as months or weeks,
Oscilatory as moons or days, embodied
As moments or breaths. You can get a billion
Or two heartbeats, maybe three, not a great feat.
The more you get, of course, the less you might
Get yet, and so you look back, in the very idea
Of you that you are a you, a body of ideas,
An idea of a body, in celebration and mourning
Of those you knew like you who got all already
That they’ll ever get and are gone as you keep on.
You’ll get there. You’ll get there. You’ll get one
When you become one, nothing more than story
And number, then, having escaped all counting,
All the human mania for social details. And then,
There is love as well, the temporal doubleness
Of all experience, whose march is for desolation.
There is love, old friend. Go ahead, take a number.

The Pole of Inaccessibility, Saint George, Utah, 5 January 2019

None of my dreams are going well.
They wake me repeatedly in disgust, dread,
Or alarm. Half of the time they end when
I say to them, during them, “this dream is
Gross, is going nowhere, is frustrating me.”
I’m tired of being reminded dreams are
Necessary and good for me. As the pole
Of inaccessibility is to the true North Pole,
An absurd and contested construct,
A derivation of an invisible point on the ice,
Both the measurement and the ice ever-shifting
Alike, the supposed place hovering in the air
Where the Arctic is precisely farthest from
Any nearest point of land, so is nightmare
To any goal, any true dream of doing anything.
It’s romantic and excitingly frightening
To ponder and think of visiting, but it’s nothing
Much, something our brains gin up to scare
The rest of the body with, to race the pulse.
And yet, the two become confused. Explorers,
Bored with other ultimate poles, daydream
Of reaching the pole of inaccessibility, while I
Daydream of writing the ultimate description
Of the weird and vicious universe of sleep.

Housing in Saint George, Utah, 4 January 2019

I had a high apartment with high windows
Halfway up a modest sandstone ridge.
The town around was mostly brown suburban
Housing, but because I was on the sixth floor
And my windows were so tall, I saw over
All those roofs and ruses, out to the panoramic
Cliffs surrounding us, from Pine Valley Mountajn
To Black Ridge, the Kolob Terrace, and Zion,
With still four-fifths of my window entirely sky
And usually blue. I was happy with this view,
Little animal, little compendium of animals
And words and animalcules that we are here
Calling, for convenience, me. I was happy, me.

Overlook That I Overlooked Before, Saint George, Utah, 3 January 2019

“The beauty of the wild irises, alas,

cannot guard against misfortune.”

Beauty remained unhinged from good or evil

And independent from grace or misfortune.

Humans continued to instruct each other

To be appreciative, to be grateful, to savor,

Even as humans continued to coordinate,

To form faithfully cooperating, loving teams,

The better to compete against other teams

The better to take over the untakeable world.

And beauty remained. The wonder of this

Unlovely world is how lovely this world is.

But beauty was never meant for us. Beauty

Was incapable of being meant before us. 

Meaning and the assignment of meaning, 

The discovery and application of meaning

For all phenomena, was our invention. Being

Grateful or feeling resentful that beauty

Remained a part of our experience, however,

Remained irrelevant. And yet. Beauty remained.

The List of Mines, Old Spanish Trail Highway, 2 January 2019

The mines were home to demons, angels,
And memories, much the same, each a gap
In the side of the soil, the earth extracted.
Here was the mine of being like a god. There
The mine of crowns. The mine of shrines,
Itself one, beside the mines of shepherding,
Priests, thrones, nobility, truth, mere wealth.
The great mines descending and ascending,
The mines of eunuchs and entertainers,
The mines of battle standards, weapons,
The mines of bargaining, sex, prostitution,
The mines of law, libel, fear, and lamentation.
The mines of the hero, undaunted by danger,
Including the danger of mines that eat heroes.
The mines of scribes, of crafts, of arts,
Of weariness, peace, and holy purification.
The mines of many forgotten instruments
Still playing sweetly inside them, gold, silver.
The mines of the troubled heart, of the floods.
The mines of the destruction of empires.
The mines of the destruction of mines.
The mines of nothing much or nothing.
The mines of minds. The mines of mine.

The Forest of Ten Trillion Pines, Near Death Valley, New Year’s Day, 2019

“Against my better judgment, I sought out
The hut of a poet.” No love lost between
My better judgment and me. A clear sky,
To be sure, and above freezing, to be sure,
But not by much, and stiff winds off the cliffs
Gusting to seek out every weakened seam.
Do you know what a pale blue sky and blood
Moons have in common? Air’s theft of blue
Wavelengths from sunlight, dividing white
Into robin’s egg and darkly bruised orange.
Pale blue now and pumpkin blood coming.
Look around. Not a tree to be found. Last
Afternoon of the previous calendar year
Old mine shafts in dry mountains rang out
Loud and clear with silence. Not a bird
To be heard once engines stopped purring.
“It goes in a mile, straight, then up a flight,
Then up another flight, then down in three
Directions, like steps. Fifteen miles of shafts
In all. My buddy and I explored it with GPS.
Dangerous though. No animals in it. Never
Saw a single bat. Well, at the very end, when
It opens into the sun again, you run into rats.
Perfect for packrats. They don’t like seeing
You coming up at them out of the black. I
Don’t like seeing them. But they avoid me
As I squeeze past them, mostly. Mostly,
They don’t want you running into them.”
Back up into the brilliant (why brilliant?) blue.
In the desert, in the mine, in the deep shafts,
In the packrat middens, shines, shines and is
Everything, the forest of ten trillion pines.