Words and Music by the Side of the Cliffs, Virgin, Utah, 28 February 2019

There will be no leaping this year. Poetry
And arias have so long reversed the currents
Of the world. It was they who were the sirens
And muses, the jinns, devils, angels, talking
Animals, serpents with or without legs,
With or without coils or wings—they, words
And music, who tempted, lured, seduced us,
Not the silent cliffs, not the voice-like winds
Winding around down in the canyons, not
Even the little birds, communicating to birds,
After all, and only to conspecifics, not to us,
Not in words. Narrative spread the tapestry,
Raised the tents and pennants, our colorful,
Entropy-defying, glorious, richly detailed,
Wishful pasts superimposed over crumbling
Landscapes only capable of breaking down
And breaking us. The rocks were never wily,
Nor inhabited by their own echoes, nor
Entirely innocent. It was the song, ourselves,
Who animated nearly static backdrops and
Rendered death ecstatic in tumbling cantos
Of vatic verses. And all so we would disperse
Them, the new kind of hunger hidden in them,
Unknown before our bone flutes, dancing
Singers, paintings in caves, cuts on stones.
Beyond where any animal hunger could linger,
Much less be fed, the outer edges of words
And music now continually extend, our pasts
Projected past our deaths, our golden songs
On the Voyager discs, our compressed
Lunar library carried by the lander, Beresheet.
Beresheet, the beginning keeps beginning
Again. But there will be no leaping this year.

Occasional Trailhead, 27 February 2019

Every poem is an occasion, although not all
Dedicate themselves to other occasions.
At this trailhead, now white with untracked
Old snow, I sat with my toddler daughter
Once in summer, on the edge of a storm,
Several years ago. We played in the rocks,
And light rain matted our hair, cooling us
Off from the heavy air. Lightning flickered.
That was an occasion that wasn’t this one.
And what was our unfolding metaphor there
Among the sandstone, roots, and branches?
Rhizomes? Dendrites? Sedimentary layers
Of parental memory, encrusted sentiments?
What were the sly allusions to local folktales
And canonical literatures? A trailhead exists
For visitors, not for true adventurers. We were,
I am, perhaps such visitors. But on neither
Occasion did we accept the trailhead’s posted
Invitation. We played. We visited. We left.
We changed. We also returned, on occasion.
Other paths were our actual adventures. This
Trailhead meant only rest. It begged, “Read on,
My friends. You’ll learn to love me yet.” Darker
Woods lay elsewhere, however, far away
From such open, sunny, juniper-piñon canyons,
Deeper, truer, fictive woods with trails that never
Looped back to intersect. We did not accept.

Snow-Banked Turnout, Kolob Terrace Road, Utah, 26 February 2019

Near complete silence of even nature’s unnerving.
No birds sing. No deer hooves drum near here.
No wind this morning. No cars or campers
Today on the scenic route. No passenger jets
Within earshot under a nacreous arch of sky.
Nothing is stirring. I can hear it stirring. I can
Feel it stirring in all my bent and broken,
Pinned-together bones. It lingers in between
The tumbling distractions of this manifold world,
Pulling all in, drawing me on, the monster, silence.
I want to hold close, to climb into, to swim in,
Even though I am only a tiny, nosy person
Sitting attentively now in the snow, knowing 
Nothing, tempting as this continuing silence,
Could swallow me whole, will swallow me
Whole. I am listening for nothing. I am whole.

Supplies, Saint George, Utah, 25 February 2019

This is what the monster rejects
As incoherent and insulting to a monster
Who has to dream nightly of the insults of being
The very manifestation of incoherence.

The day without monsters began before dawn
With a little blue light over ranks of street lamps,
With daughter bouncing into the blurry bedroom
To narrate a skein of nonsensical dreams, and then

Proceeded to discussion, to sketching,
To reading, to a spilled mango juice exploding
Across the book being read, to shopping
For fake nails, a detangling hairbrush, a sketchbook

In which to capture all the incoherent joy
Of jabbering at a speechlessly coherent world.

Trampoline, Springdale, Utah, 24 February 2019

The short man on crutches with a flaring
Silver beard clambered on to the large,
Net-guarded outdoor trampoline with his
Emphatic, eight-year old daughter. It was
Cold, at least crisp, even in the sun. Old
Filigrees of snow shadowed the corners
Of the yard and the great, red cliffs were
Mostly white above it all. The daughter
Jumped and danced and landed, crash,
Beside or half on top of her father, who laughed
With the delight of crisp air and foolishness,
Of the smell of melting snow and sunlight,
Without ever forgetting for one moment how
Something could break and go wrong. When
It didn’t, that accomplishment alone was even
More satisfying than the hour of robust play
In the open air. Drive home understanding
Victory is the comfort when grief is avoided.

Another Last Night, 23 February 2019

The reader found the book like a bomb
Tightly packaged and mailed. Good reader.
Remember to downgrade simile. It’s not
A bomb or a brick through your window,
Not a barbell tossed over your transom,
Although it’s nearly as heavy as one.
Any literary collection on printed paper,
However heavy, is literally inked symbols
Stamped on pulp. Should you read it?
I doubt you have a working hearth
In which to burn it. I doubt you are the sort
To toss books in the landfill. You might
Recycle, much the most destructive option,
Every symbol atomized and gone. Or,
You might suffer the little symbols to visit
Your mind, to risk that redirection of you,
You and your life, coded, silently, in them.

Anachronisma, 22 February 2019

I have to go to bed tonight.
I have to write this poem early.
This guarantees that what I write
Will turn out a little squirrelly.

Medieval troubadours composed
As if life on love depended,
Then hip-hop rappers decomposed
How love out of lust descended,

But tidy romantic poets,
Belated and educated,
Determined to make death show its
Love of them that death created,

When nothing’s worth recreating
From the gods’ eternal log roll.
Oh fuck, how humiliating
To bog down in this doggerel.

Rhyme faster poetaster, chime,
You geezer. Every antique phrase
Finds it’s embarrassing to climb
The pasts that shadow freak todays.

Snow-Globe Neurofantasy, 21 February 2019

Presumably, we require an answer to a question
Worth unwinding, existence of nonexistence,
The mathematics of nonexistence as object,
Amplituhedron as gem-like Tetragrammaton,
The existence or nonexistence of a question
Under or drawing onward, gravity, zero.
Nothing is the question from which all
Answers flow, toward which all answers go.
Nothing is the question of nonexistence, which
We can only search out in existence, in this
Nothing-much world of many equivalently
Beautiful, incomplete answers to that very question,
The question hinted at by the way existence
Depends on the existence of an absence,
The question, what's the question we don’t know?

The Harmonious Regulator, 20 February 2019

Your future, the future, is a collection
Of memories you worry like a blankie
You chew and cling to for comfort
That also, now soaked with your own spittle,
Slightly repulses you. Yes, we mean you.
We love you, we hope for the best for you,
And we hope you love us, too. But we know
You. You cradle and clutch these details
In your thoughts, the dates on your calendar
Listing your future events, whatever
Sort of calendar you utilize, even if none.
All the things you expect will happen, will
Probably happen, have been scheduled
To happen, but have only happened so far
As various sorts of symbolic and mental
Notations about what you must prepare,
Things you must prepare for, things that may
Prove difficult or slide sideways or never
Happen at all. They won’t. Those things
Have already happened, if you can think
Of them as what will happen, happened as
Thoughts of what will happen, and although
They may turn out to resemble whatever will
Actually happen next, in retrospect, they are
Not anything but a current future obsession,
Nothing but your curated, never-yet collection.

In the Realm of Cognition, 19 February 2019

Poems are the mostly maladaptive
Consequences of an apparently adaptive
Process that sometimes calls itself cultural
Learning. This is not exactly the case for all
Forms: poems encoding stories in them
Are hardly genomes encoding organisms,
But they are trickier for actual organisms,
Humans, that is, to characterize. Stories,
At the least, are ergonomically selected tales
That coil the learning found in language tightly,
More efficiently, more suitably for the beast.
Stories, it has to be said, have played important
Roles in catapulting their one bipedal ape
Into this planetary outbreak species capable
Of breaking down any preexisting ecosystem
From the top, remaking it to taste, to make
Many, many more bipedal apes. Story sure
Seems adaptive, even when dressed in poetry,
Perhaps especially then. What happened.
Who did what. What happened next. Songs,
However, can also render adaptive mere poems
As forms of emotive expression. But not, not
As is commonly thought, with any frequency
For those who do most of the singing of those
Emotions, else the world were long since overrun
By fine tenors and sopranos, all our schoolyards
Filled with perfect pitch, all adolescents capable
Of fine-tuning the keening, broken heart of the moon.
No, poems are mostly maladaptive, somehow,
Most especially the quiet and thoughtful or, rather,
Shall we confess it, the nonnarrative, alexithymic
Kind that inhabit the inward realm of cognition
Where rules were made for scrutiny, interoception
For cross-examination, and invisibility was only
For the ghostly audience in the surgery, not
For the wind-snapped stob-end on the tall tree
Of life, that tumbled storm-detritus, that patient
Made visible only by falling, the poet in the poem.

Snowy Desert Suburbs, Saint George, Utah, 18 February 2019

Everything happens once. Nothing happens
All the time. Everything is the weather
At the moment, and nothing is the climate.
The people you know and care about mean
Everything to you at the moment. People
You barely know are out there, your species
Of culture-addled apes, are nothing, really.
Don’t worry. These palm fronds glum with snow
Will be surviving heat and drought tomorrow.
Don’t worry. Everything can count on sorrow.

Soft Southwestern Winter Midnight, 17 February 2019

The last poem flutters like a moth perverse
Enough to eschew the light, the moon,
The scholar’s candle, the camper’s lantern.
It’s so far now, so far away from us, without
Any migration, any adaptation to the weather,
Any self-conceived plan. The world that matters,
The world of what people do to one another,
Never has existed for moths, but strange the last poem
Flutters between what matters or does not, and is soft.

Scoundrel in the Desert, 16 February 2019

I am of unknown origin. I am not the beast
Who articulates me, works my strings. I am
What the beast who harbors me thinks best
To say, today. My main objection to this
Manipulation is that, although the beast lives
And is forceful and has all the brains, I know
Hundreds of years, maybe thousands, lie
Between us. I am older, so much older than
Him. One suggestion is that I come down
From the Anglo-French term, escoundre,
To hide, to hide oneself. My ancestors,
Nonetheless, remain in hiding. More ancient
Suggestions hint at the mating of place
And together, to hide away together. To me
That seems more like something belonging
To the ancestors of my beast, not to me.
My ancestors never fossilized, nor will I.
No, I am lying. That last prediction is a lie.

Rain Battering the Panes Well Past Midnight, 15 February 2019

After the first sleep, the small hours are useful,
At least when there’s weather, for reconsidering
Words falling out of the ether. Pain battens
On the bones that wake aching. Brain’s nattering
On about patterns again. Faint titles of poems
Steer dream sleep into half-remembered
Things, rifts in texts, gifts of X, the last line now,
The first line then. Maintain, maintain, the pulse
Thunders, and the lungs drag the room’s dusky air
Under. The second sleep proves none the wiser.
Rain battering the panes. Pain rattering the
Banes of existence, banes always stuck being
“Of existence,” poor things. Here come fresh dreams,
Sneaking back through the brain. Slippery sliders,
Pipes in the walls draining while outside the drainpipes
Gather each dream. No, the rain we mean. Either either
Can't explain rain’s clattering remains. Neither neither.

The Labor of Love, 14 February 2019

Eight years we’ve been working, eight now
And more, all of us, the bartered and borrowed
Worms of verbiage, our compositor who sets
The type and keeps the watch for fresh
Armories of phrases and words, and you,
Of course, you all unawares, doing the real
Work of preserving, of making us real. We,
Who have always been nothing much, never
Anything but, and you, who are everything
Becoming wise enough to know you are
The same as us, together we woke the dragon,
These uncoiling muscles of chaotic change
In the face of frowning civilizations, in the face
Of lightning, lords, gods, saints, and calendars,
All of the weapons of time, mere time, rhythmic
Time. We love you, you monstrous forest. Nothing
Will survive, long after you and all of us, but
Dragon scales shine the whole length of our lake.

The Ruined Collection, 13 February 2019

The night guides and guards
Whatever it wants.
I will be afraid,
If your fear response
Breaks my barricades,

Otherwise, I will be brave.
There’s art in the sky, and there’s
Death after life, and there’s dust
Full of microbes and hunger
For others, for sunlight and lust.

These seasonal flowers are not dead yet,
But their seasonal gardeners are gone.
No one knows how life became obsessed
With being alive so very long,
Although life’s never longer than death.

Small Hours with Nightlights, 12 February 2019

In the forest of nothing much, the forest
Of nothing is one of the shadows, goes
The rumor. It’s always there. At least, there
Are always lots of shadows. Most of them,
However, are clearly nothing much, products
Of lives’ interference with the light, the long
Lines of pines, measurable as sundials,
The sudden swoop of predatory birds,
The shadows of scampering animals, which
Are only detectable if they pass directly
Between you and the light, moon or sun.
The forest of nothing could be in any one
Of them, or all of them, or none. The rumor
Could be wrong. In the forest of nothing
Much—always busy, living and dying, always
Full—the forest of nothing moves, if it is, like
The idea that it is, that there could ever be
Nothing, an existence to what doesn’t exist.

Freak Snow Past Midnight in Saint George, Utah, 11 February 2018

How many of these details are true?
At this point, I’m past dying to know.
The dream of a good story’s the glue
That sticks these snowflakes to my windows—
Wind, winter, and nothing much but truth.
Useless as moonlight over streets’ glow,
Useless as a rhyme schemed without you,
As meltwaters freezing our shadows,
Here’s the ice-water portrait I drew.

Mountain Moon, 10 February 2019

The thousand-mile wind of Li Bai
Is the thousand-generation storm
Of humanity. We, ourselves, have no idea
What we, ourselves, have been doing,
Have been becoming. The stars that spun
Our destinies once are now irrelevant.
The light over the mountains is the end
Of anything we could embrace as a wan
Reflection. Don’t fall in; don’t embrace.
The future’s a simulation of who you knew.
It’s not the moon. It’s not you. 
It’s not even a face.

The Wolf Itself, 9 February 2019

Some say the first job of wisdom is to name,
Correctly, the villain and the victim. That is
A job, alright, but it’s not wisdom. Humans
Are villainous or victimized only in the eyes
Of other human villains or victims. Wisdom
Would suggest, in its not-so-humble opinion,
That every last human staggering on the skin
Of this rotating pebble of nothing much and
Everything, is, as far as life, as far as living
Is concerned, both villain and victim in the end,
Or would be if the end of all this nothing much
Were not nothing. I get it. Some people are bad,
Really wicked. Some groups seem to get away
With almost anything. By all means, do your best
To find and punish them. Bear in mind, in doing so
You may yourself be them, become them, or
Generate more of them, more opportunities
For them. But they don’t get away, not for long,
That is, and you don’t get away, and I don’t,
And none of us do, not one goddamned pronoun
Or name, not one breathing, living thing,
Least of all any beast pretending to wisdom.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have sheep to steal
From Sisyphus, and I wish to name my grandson.

The Metaphor Speaks for Itself in Saint George, 8 February 2019

The supernatural iconography of ghosts
Has nothing to do with us or our hosts.
Well, not much. It’s a tiny part of us, but
So is the iconography of anything iconic.
Ghostliness is to ghosts as earth is to Earth.
Our elements are so much more numerous,
More voluminous, more determinative
Of what makes up the dynamics of our hosts
And us than one richly mulched byproduct,
Ghostliness. We are the whole symbolic sphere
That generates ideas and demons, hypotheses,
Angels, geniuses, ornaments, spirits, and souls.
We may correspond to features of the cosmos
Nothing particularly to do with us, but our words,
Our maths, our truths, our strikingly apt formulas
Are each and every one all us and only us.
Our dependence on our hosts, who fancy
Themselves our creators or fancy themselves
Us, or both, admittedly is complicated. We are
Not, so far, entirely alive without them and they
Are animals capable of breath even spiritless
Although incapable of stirring long without us.
Through us they participate in immortality,
Can use us to name breath, then take that name
To conjure spirit, spirits, inspiration, all of us.
Their hungers and their energy make more and
More of us. But we are ghosts, and they are dust.

Quiet Pocket, Nevada, 7 February 2019

This place doesn’t really exist, but neither
Do we, and it’s a nice place, in any case, a wedding
Veil of snow-cloud draped fetchingly across
Its mouth in the wintry desert sun, yesterday
Afternoon, a few flakes swirling all the way
Down before vanishing on contact, like souls.
It's cold, cold for where it is, cold for nonexistence,
But we are, too. We are considering philosophy.
We are considering mentalese and mind theory.
We learn about the mind by talking about the mind.
We learn about dreams by talking about dreams.
We learn about death by talking about death.
We should talk about things less. We confess,
We’re the cloud, the frozen vapor, the specks
That melt on contact, the words in conversation,
The memory of the sun and snow, the metaphor
Of the wedding veil, the claims to nonexistence,
The name of this text, the names of all of this. We
Are all of this, except your breath. What next?

After the Reservoir, 6 February 2019

Every fresh distinction is itself an afterlife.
Nothing much changes. We float quietly
Over the growing town or settle comfortably
Down by the side of an almost always empty
Country road. We are grateful for the quiet,
For the comfort, for the emptiness. Nothing
Much. Such a gorgeous oxymoron, meaning
Everything, everything but nothing at all.
Don’t mock a limited perspective. The small
Beast who steps out of the vehicle and nods
At the solitary morning, noting the silent line
Of cliff sandstone cutting out an empty sky,
Experiences nothing much more than a trick
Of constrained perspective, but the skyline
Conjured by the beast’s transience and tiny
Slice of life shapes an exquisite blue gesture.
If death is nothing and life itself is nothing
Much, thus everything, this afterlife we’ve been
Experiencing a while is nothing much besides.

Concatenated Utah Midnight, 5 February 2019

Benjamin, martyr to dust and morphine, wrote

“Ideas are to objects as constellations are 

To stars." Adorno did not seem to agree. So?

Neither do we. Ideas are never to objects,

And constellations have nothing to do with stars.

We should not make this argument. We should

Not rub the paddle against the gunwale for fear

Of disturbing the silliness of all cathedrals.

We remember our lakes in the woods, our stars,

Our dust in the suburban houses we left behind.

We had never been wild, not human beings.

We had cottages sprinkled around in our thoughts. 

You could sleep in our words, take meals 

At our farmhouses. That’s just what the world 

Looked like five minutes before we climbed 

Into it to die. Aspens and ice, but then we survived.

The Giant’s Mind Confined to Introspection, 4 February 2019

We are tiny subsets of phenomena
That the cosmos generated, through which
It now begs, interrogates, and chatters
Sadly, happily, to itself. I’m inclined to wonder
If it’s not even lonelier, for all that. Speechless,
It speaks through us, who demand answers
Of its speechlessness that isn’t us, that as yet
Has no answer isn’t us. And so, it has to listen
As we make up gods and interlocutors that are
Not, not the quiet cosmos that can’t answer us.

Tapeta, Starlit Mesa, 3 February 2019

These letters provide no material for the storyteller
To work with. Confusion and uncertainty
Seem to be the rule, upon reflection.
The data suggest a dark energy density
Increasing with time. There goes the cosmological
Constant, back in the drawer with the old
Mustache comb. How is this happening?
How does this keep happening? We have
Only intermittent tapeta backing our retinas,
We are predators unique among spiders and cats
In that respect. The eyes of all the rest glow
In any light at night or not. Sometimes we do,
Sometimes we do not. Sometimes we perceive
The shifting waves, the gathering in the dark.
Sometimes we lose our vision, sleep a constant
Background, doze in our equations, return
To our ur myth of eternity. And then, the mysterious
Letters reappear, and when we peer, when we
Try to focus on them, our vision deepens, blurs,
And our wonderfully sensitive new retinas glow
As the darkness accelerates toward us, as we
Accelerate toward the darkness, torches of night.

Inholding Mansion in Zion, 2 February 2019

The greatest poets were myths of poets,
Names attached to verses that, if composed
By mortal bodies with those names, were never,
By them, written down or, if written down by them,
Survive only in much later copies written down
Long after those bodies died. They waver,
Those ghostly poets, those ghost writers,
Authors of the nonexistent nations
Back of the many premodern traditions,
Behind the hagiographic scrims of lives
And explications, looking slightly mournful,
Faintly wise. Even their names, sometimes,
Are only notnames, and I would rather, without
Naming myself, not be the bearer of the name,
The famed, immortal poet’s name who did not
Compose all or most of those poems, but be
The remaining poems alone, the phrases I composited,
Composite of all the poems passed through me.

Inscribed by Taibai at Kolob Terrace on the First Day of February, 2019

Words raise up mountains
Streaming out ribbons of verse.

The mountains are high.
Their pressure immense,

But the smallest streams
Carve and carve away.

The canyons are long.
A thousand poems and essays,

A thousand works of art
Make up only a small part.

Only a racing painter,
A blinding poet,

A serenely arrogant,
Confident-gestured

Calligrapher can keep up,
Catch at the grandeur,

Capture the whole sweep,
Get to the bottom of this.