New Harmony, Utah, 31 March 2019

The other day I noticed an unknown name appearing
On many of my smartphone photographs
Taken over a span of several years, a toponym
I had never seen in the actual, ongoing world
In which I had held up my device to take
Those images: New Harmony, New Harmony.
A wind came up the high canyon slope
Where I was sitting with nothing better to do
Than listen to the wind and soak in the spring sun,

Rip van Winkling, while I toyed with my artificial past.
New Harmony, New Harmony, New Harmony. Huh.
And where was I now, then? I took a picture
And checked the screen to see how it was labeled.
New Harmony. The nearest speck of town downslope
Was Virgin. Up slope was a road still sewn shut with snow
No doubt now melting into the still-white Kolob Reservoir.
The bleached white rocking-horse in the aspens was up there,
Probably still snowed-in at least to its ears. Check that picture.
New Harmony also. The reservoir pictures read Reservoir.
The cliff pictures below read Virgin. Everything anywhere
In the town-less canyons between them read New Harmony,
Regardless of whether the photo had been taken at a point
Inside or outside the boundaries of the national park.
We think we know where we are, or at least that we are
Somewhere we actually were. All these years, returning
To whatever nooks and crannies of these canyons
Body—breakable, barely moveable, somehow perdurable
Body—could drag self, soul, puppet, mind, words,
Portable books and devices, we were all in New Harmony
Together. Was there ever an Old Harmony? Any Harmony?
Perhaps some town back in Connecticut.
What scriptural pipe dream, twirling like a pillar of cloud
Through the millennia and around the globe from the first Zion
To this Zion, thought to label a disheveled collection of stones,

Conifers, streams, washes, scrub, mule deer, ravens, and coyotes
Harmonious and new? I don’t much want to know. So. The other
Day I sat, half the morning, on a stone not far from the road,
Listening to the wind and the streams of snowmelt pouring,
To the occasional long groan trailing yet another jet overhead,
As if it were a revelation, these memories my artificial
Intelligence had just regrouped. Harmony. True. Always new.

A Bird’s Nest in Zion, 30 March 2019

Why not pretend, this time, I was there? Why not
Pretend that I’m here now, remembering there
And then, and writing this? Wouldn’t it be, for once,
Romantic? I was asking this, rhetorically, of my old friend,
The poet Brian Russell. We were sitting in my backyard in Zion
One fine morning in early spring when the ornamentals
Still had blossoms, watching a robin at work on a nest,
Probably a decoy nest, as robins tend to build those,
Having been selected by squirrels for deceptions.
Brian was complaining again about the habits
Of other poets, how predictably they write
About what they see, say a bird building a nest
In their backyard, how he wouldn’t object
To the autobiography, but god, if you’re going
To tell the truth, at least make it interesting.
I tried pointing out to him that autobiography
Was not my intention, that the truth was hardly worth
Mentioning, but he wasn’t paying attention. I tried
To convince him that autobiography would be
Impossible in this instance, as this was not my backyard
Any more, and I hadn’t seen a robin build a nest here
In years, and we weren’t in Zion together, he and I,
We weren’t there at all, had never been friends,
And, in truth, I had never met him. But Brian, being
Brian, wasn’t at all present and still wasn’t listening.
Look, I said. Forget the bird’s nest. It’s like this.
Back when the world was really the world, before
We knew it was just a minuscule blue marble in the dark,
When mountains were eternal and the ocean was
An unfathomable, all-swallowing, boundless abyss,
When the skies were heaven, untouchable, and all
The stars were shining for the sake of our fate and delight,
I started this damned poem with something simple,
One of the smaller elements of stories and origins,
Just a woman, a man, and a newborn. Presto! A nest,
A single atom of nuclear family. Over the years, I kept
Composing. The infant grew into a persona, a child.
The man did man stuff, like going for broke, falling,
Breaking, and lying. The woman did woman stuff, like longing
For a better life, a new world, a new man, not so much
Mothering. They broke up. The child continued growing up.
The man did more man stuff, like trying to kill himself.
The woman did more woman stuff, like trying to find herself.
They moved around from nest to nest, together and then
Separately. Some of those nests were decoys. This poem,
Meanwhile, got bigger and more tangled, until It threatened
To drag down the whole tree. You see? But Brian
Wasn’t there, and Brian didn’t see. If you go to Zion,
In spring, people say, be sure to look for the weird,
Giant nest of thousands and thousands of blossoming twigs
Weighing down one obscure backyard mulberry tree.

Generative Shocks With Reasons in Zion, 29 March 2019

“The logical form itself
Is, in a sense, expressive.”
Today no shocks have followed
The tone shocks followed
On previous days.
“The rat has acquired
Another, new truth
That takes precedence:
‘But not today.’” At the sound
Of the tone, it’s not today.
Segue to regulation
Of expression by logic.
Shadows wing over our thoughts.
Ok, sit still. Breathe slowly.

The charioteer
Is a horse people’s conceit
For control, as the horses
Are conceits for tamed passions.
How self-domesticated
Can we possibly become?
Enough to invent more devilish
Chariots, deadlier games,
More ruthlessly binary
Systems and conceits.
The cortex is Inhaber,
Raising reason’s regiments
For a share of the plunder,
But the system is the king.

Prevarication
Is truth’s greatest gift.
The capacity to lie
Requires a capacity
To think what is and is not
And which someone means.
After the Great Fire
Could London have been rebuilt
With the Welsh bluestones
Quarried for Stonehenge?
Is such a question
More spleen than brain? The second
Question is the one that’s mad,
Not the first. A binary

Cannot be subsumed
By any fine monism,
Although the monist
Is right to call out
The dualist’s foolishness.
It’s that madness multiplies.
Binary oppositions
Refuse to be fused
And can never be condensed.
The expressive form itself,
Is, in a sense, logical,
Is many senses.
The rat will always acquire
Fresh truths. But not yesterday.

Coyote, the Almost Messenger, Kolob Terrace, 28 March 2019

“a secret door leading to a world for the special people or prisoners”

The messenger is present, somehow, in the midst

Of the messages. Angels are ink. Angels 

Do not care to eat meat. Angels say this. 

Ghosts say that. Gods scurry them along.

Somehow, in the midst of all these messages,

The messenger is present, however evanescent,

The nothing in the nothing much, the coyote

Slipping through the underbrush, checking over

The shoulder to make sure the coast is clear. Precious

Professors set themselves a task too clever 

By half, arranging deep thoughts as words in boxes,

Giving in to the temptation to count things, not counting

The footnotes proving what they’ve read outside

The little boxes. Not only coyotes, but foxes. The birds

Sing anyway. Birds have to sing. Angels, incidentally,

Can be ghosts and voiceless. Silent messages sent 

By silence, which is not the messenger, nor quiet, quite.

Almost. The absence present, somehow, in the midst

Of all the messages, the absence present as the ghost.

Sic et Non Sic, 27 March 2019

“by reference to the larger unity of the logical whole which consists in the assertions p, ~p”

He tried so hard, Abelard.

He saw the contradictions,

Tried his best to resolve them.

Tried to steer clear of trouble

When making his excuses.

Trouble found him just the same.

Contradiction’s inherent

In every resolution.

The monist embraces this,

The whole of this and not this

(Not without contradiction).

Abelard was stuck with saints,

Scriptures, Augustine, Jerome,

Hand-me down Aristotle,

Permissible Cicero.

How to praise doubt and question

The uncertain when the truth

Was known to have been revealed?

But we’re still stuck with those saints, 

Angelic mathematics,

Empirical prophecies,

And all the sempiternal 

Scriptures of contradiction

Inherent in that question,

Our one, obsessive question,

Is this thus or is this not?

Thus, not thus—divisible

And thus inseparable.

Koko-tangiwai, Kolob Canyons, Utah, 26 March 2019

I came to Kolob Canyons
With you, once, in May.
Later, we married. We tried.

I came to Kolob Canyons
Alone on the day you died.
It was winter. It was bright.

A year later, in autumn,
Far, far south with someone else,
I bought a piece of tearstone

And hung it around my neck.
That night in those glowworm caves
I thought about ghostly light,

How ghosts always come from life.
The outside night seemed so bright.
After Doubtful Sound, I lost

The tearstone necklace,
And I lost the someone else.
A snapshot of a kea

Up a high slope’s all I’ve got.
Last night I drove to Kolob
For the sunset and the dusk.

A Little Greenery on the Mountain, Desert Mound Road, Utah, 25 March 2019

There is no greater ethical dare
Than to love the world that does not care.
We want to so badly that we try
To make it easier with the lie
That the world is like us, but better,
That there’s intention in the weather,
The seasons, the tides, the stars, the quakes,
One wise God, or gods who make mistakes
And pick favorites, but who care at least.
It feels possible to love a beast,

Impossible to love what can’t hurt.
In high country, where the wind murmurs,
We could try to love the lack of ghosts.
Not our home. We don’t have to play host.
Don’t you love it? How there’s nothing near
That craves love from you, nothing up here?
You want firewood from your scenery,
Learn to keep a little greenery,
But a world without care won’t blame you.
Why not love what can never shame you?

Time Is a Subset of Change and All Change Is Partial at Baker Dam Reservoir, Utah, 24 March 2019

Shao said forms can transform but ch’i only changes

Because spirit must change but cannot split. Look,

He was overly in love with symmetrical speculation,

But it was a legitimate effort at a distinction,

A first step toward the end of the line in division.

Examine any remainder closely enough and you will

Find further change within it, and yet something 

There is, some aspect that has not changed, although

It has change continuing within every infinitesimal,

However you have defined it. Temporal types

Of changes are particularly rhythmic, but that

Only goes to point to another trait, that the ways

Change changes can never be completely split.

Might as well posit ch’i or divinity or spirit, any

Cosmological constant if you can’t get further

Down the line than that. Every aspect of the cosmos

Is nonidentical to itself, however you define it,

Contains both active difference and enduring sameness

At all points within it. So what do you make of this?

This little lake, a reservoir hardly more than a puddle,

Even brim-full at the end of a wet winter in the high desert,

Is not in any respect static nor ever, in passing,

Not at all the same. The three men in an old rowboat

With a grunting outboard go up and down the lake.

A yellow dog belonging to one of them runs

Up and down the shore in parallel, tongue lolling.

Waterfowl rise, descend, and paddle along the margins.

The rowboat’s outboard has a rhythm. So does

The dog’s gallop and panting. You can time them.

There’s not a drop of water pooling here that isn’t a world

Of animalcules, infusoria, molecules, and atoms,

And if you could isolate any one of them you’d find

More of the same inside, winking at you, however

You spent and measured your time. You might even find

Old Shao and his harmonious ch’i or your own 

Notions of ghosts and angels staring back at you,

Minuscule ideas at cosplay in the changing rooms

Of your slowly churning, monomictic imagination.

The men don’t catch a single fish. They decide

To pack it in, but the yellow dog never gives up on them.

What Is It Like to Be Like That on a Balcony in St. George, Utah, 23 March 2019?

As when a symbol, realizing itself to be such, to be

Required by current usage to be a something that stands

For something else, probably something else less compact,

Less efficient to produce in and of itself, something else

That would take much longer to instantiate, understands

A symbol can be symbolized by another and another,

Any number of symbols, by all the apocryphal turtles

Of symbols upon symbols, “all the way down,” decides

To speak for itself, to be the ground of its own meaning,

So the bat, dancing with its desperate hunger on the air

Beyond the evening balcony, chooses to come to rest abruptly,

Inverted, under the open door, heart racing with the effort

Of being a bat, of being what it is like to be a bat and not

A symbol, a turtle, or an infinite stack of turtles any longer, crying

In a voice so precise it describes the presence and trajectory

Of every flying bug in the twilight, a song so shrilly perfect

The highest hosannas of ghosts and of angels cannot reach above

And enclose such qualia, that the cosmos produces consciousness

Does not necessarily entail a conscious cosmos! Like a symbol

Of a turtle left deep in a cave home to bats, like a hard problem posed

By a soft philosopher, the conscious thought sheds no light of its own.

Tap Water, Utah, 22 March 2019

What if you pulled together something remarkable, dangerous,
Almost incredible, and no one noticed? Would you be left
Crying warnings like teenagers in a 1950s movie about monsters
Or aliens, like Cassandra by the gate, or like a vendor
With a flimsy stall full of elaborate horoscopes no one wants?
Would you be left with one hand holding a hand-me-down glass
Of tap water, barely potable, drawn downwind from the rivers
Of Zion, your other hand holding up a tangle of words like vipers,
A skein of accidental serpents that you have woven together
And that you swing around your head, miraculously, unbitten
And unbidden? You would, your words hiss, coiling around you.
You pretend the water is toxic, is poison, which could well
Be true, taking a gusty swig and winking at no one besides you.

Kicking the Can Down the Road, Saint George Boulevard, 21 March 2019

Solidity is just the behavior of resisting
Intrusion. The astronomers’ equinox arrived
At a traffic light. Light rain on dogwoods
Blossoming along landscaped roads,
Plastic bags caught in their branches.
Don’t open the car windows. Stay solid.
Can’t get out of the game? Extend it.
There’s a stigma to the art of avoidance,
To kicking the can down the road. It’s an art,
Nonetheless, keeping options open longer,
Keeping the more summative changes,
The conclusions, at bay for another day.
Time is not so easily purchased, anyway,
And if you can glide into spring this easily,
Then days in a distant summer, victory,
Windows of opportunities, warm breezes
Over green waves, are no longer so far away.

Red Cliffs, Utah, Spring Equinox, 2019

It feels like a balancing act, but it isn’t,
To comprehend change and continuity
Through the absurd means of lyric poetry,
Or something like lyric poetry, mostly
Non-narrative, unscientific, non-dramatic
Nonsense, a bibliotheca abscondita of ideas,
A mirrored funhouse cabinet of curiosities,
The glittering coils of Leviathan turning
And sliding past each other on the dark nest.
You can only hope the monster is dreaming.
It’s true nothing simply collapses, but claims
We love, that it’s all perfectly homeostatic,
Strongly anthropic, just the way we want it,
Explain nothing much about how it changes,
How anything remains the same in change.
You have to sneak up on Leviathan sleeping.
You have to embrace the endless shifting.
The scales of the cosmos are not the toys
We make. They shine on the dragon’s back.

Under a Cottonwood in Snow Canyon, Utah, 19 March 2019

Here’s that broody restlessness of a lonely
Day just before astronomical spring. Plenty
Of people about, none you’d want to talk to.
They certainly like talking to each other,
Amiable as the flies at their picnic tables,
Noisier than the muffled cars sliding by.
All the evidence suggests that solitude,
Being marooned without a close-knit tribe,
Is bad for you, brings on dementia, brings on
Heart troubles, bad habits, despair. Oof.
You know the truth, you who distrusts truth
As the subject of a rumor distrusts a rumor.
It’s not the condition but the kind of being
Lonely matters most. During the passing
Intervals when all the human voices go,
No cars cruise down the distant road, only
The massive raven complaining, mundanely,
As it passes a blue-gray pair of fidgety jays,
The solitude is potent, sweet, and dizzying,
Your favorite old-fashioned cocktail of everything
Being everything just getting on with nothing
Much and signifying nothing. Ok, the raven
May be saying something to the jays, but
You haven’t a clue what is. It sounds pleasant
For the same reason that it’s a fine thing to be
In a cafe in a country where no one speaks
A tongue you understand a word of, the same
Reason it’s tranquil and untroubling to hear
A perfect soprano warbling lyrics you can’t
Parse, only enjoy in your ear. You could prove
Marvelously longevous if you could live like this,
If all the messages you perused were those
You chose, if company were an occasional
Diversion, and solitude otherwise perfect. Shush.
There it goes again. Reality, that myth, life
As it exists without us, permission to exist.

Warm Springs in Mild Weather, Nevada, 18 March 2019

After the ranch buildings burned down
And ranching was abandoned, the palms
Around the stone irrigation ditch grew into it,
Forcing the spring water out over the ground.
Thick groves of them, gigantic palms, loom
Over the ruined ditch now, although
The springs have been re-channeled
And reclaimed for conservation purposes,
And archaeologists have practiced in the ditch.
Bits of cheap china and old tins turned up.
Taken as a whole, here’s the valley’s human
Story (and are there any other kinds?) so far:
Although Clovis points have been found north
Of the valley, the earliest horizon seen here
Was nine thousand years ago, the Archaic.
Humans, in other words, got to this place late.
Then a few thousand years of mostly the same,
Then the borrowings or intrusions from the south,
From the coast, beans, corns, squash, pottery,
Bows and arrows, advanced basketry techniques,
Eventually a few centuries of full-on Puebloan,
And then those gone in the centuries of drought.
Historically, Paiutes, presumably moving in
From California after the Puebloans, but too long
Ago to have a cultural memory of their conquest,
If it was a conquest, mixing low-intensity
Agriculture with hunting by when the Jesuits
First troubled them. Another century or so,
And then the usual western. Outlaws, Mormons,
Ranchers, developers, conservationists. Today,
A quiet place, channeled water burbling along
The edge of the stands of massive palms,
Guides for birders at the trailhead parking lot.
This tomorrow having been as unimaginable
To the outlaws and the Muddy Mission Mormons
As they were to the first Paiutes, the Paiutes
To the Puebloans, the Puebloans with their corn

And adobe to the mammoth hunters, the mammoth
Hunters to the mammoths, we should expect
The tomorrows beyond us to be equally unimaginable,
However obsessed we are with dreaming them up.
Bit of wind shifting the fronds, now, nothing else.

Marsh Sounds at Adams-McGill Reservoir, Nevada Before St. Patrick’s Day, 2019

I’m here for the quiet, not for the view,
Although the view has handsome aspects: snow
On tilted peaks that ring the reservoir,
A single scarf of lacy white, a veil
Behind which nothing but stone faces hide,
The mirror of the reservoir itself,
Its ripples made by far-off cranes and ducks,
A giant dome of blue and barren sky
Without a single contrail scoring it.
A black-headed duck appears from the reeds
And barks a hoarse, hard squawk that startles me.
His species I can’t name nor recognize,
And I don’t want to, neither. Otherwise,
The water coming down the hill is all
The sound I hear. Enough. Let’s stop this here.

Pahranagat Lake Refuge, Nevada, 16 March 2019

Down at the shore, the lonely child plays
With her ghosts, and a little ways up the slope
One of her older ghosts builds a careful fire
With just the right amount of proper kindling.
The evening sun soars through him like a sail.
Higher still on the unseen highways, the trucks
Can be heard rumbling by, making a passing
Sound, something like a series of short trains
Or staccato jet planes, a whoosh, a small quiet,
Another whoosh, and a grrrrr every little while.
It’s not yet high migration time. A few ducks,
A few blackbirds in the reeds, but the lake
Is mostly empty, and the handful of campers
At the sites along the margins haven’t launched
A single one of their towed rowboats. The child
Does not realize, hasn’t the faintest clue
That she, like the blackbird in his epaulettes,
Like the ducks on the margins, like the campers,
The old shadow tending his smokeless fire,
The highway, the trucks, is not here right now,
Is only lonely like all of us and playing with ghosts
Because she also is one of us, one of the ghosts.
Words have no choice except to haunt us.
Words have only, ever, afterlife, and float.

Balcony Poem, 15 March 2019

The Ides again. Orion high. Time for the ovis
Idulis to trot up Via Sacra to the Arx to die.
Time to pay up. How did the Etruscans
Come up with this? What did this mean
To them, in their language mostly forgotten
By the tides of Latinii who conquered them?
Never mind. Great Caesar’s ghost has come
To love the sacrificial spring. When young,
It was the autumn Orion rising, the hunter
Ascendant, bow in hand, that was more
Pleasing. Now, having survived the fall, many,
Many, many falls, including the final swoon
Under the ice, into the water of shuddering
(Ave Charon, nice to see you again), Caesar
Finds he prefers the spring, all of the springs
That bubble up out of the underground,
Like him. Bring on the Ides. This is the north;
The flowers and the warmth have to follow.

Snow in Pine Valley, Utah, 14 March 2019

It’s getting late in the season for this, even
At this altitude, but there’s a bright thickness
Covering the shorter grasses and smaller stones,
A weight of wind-blown coats bending branches,
And a new white dazzle filling the sunny air.
Not another human within walking distance,
At least not within a stroll from here. The world,
However posted with signs and wonders, says thus
Nothing much at the moment, nothing substantial,
Although nothing much is much more beautiful,
More detailed than nothing, which is why, maybe,
Nothing craves it all, embraces every shift of light,
Loves it madly, drawing out every falling detail,
Every sun-caught cloud, every flake of snow.
The loneliness of nothing is the only thing
Explaining why there’s nothing much at all.

Cane Beds and Joshua Trees, Arizona, 13 March 2019

There’s no urgency to accomplishing this.
You have the capacity to consume quickly,
But you might as well take this one slow
Or even wait a bit. Bookmark the place.
You can come back to us later. We will be
Waiting, likely, and even if we have disappeared
Forever, you don’t need us. You certainly don’t
Need to prove you read us. And what would be
The point in any case? You’re here now,
Which probably means you already did.
You’re free to leave. We have to let you go.
We have things we want to whisper to ourselves.

Three Holistic Fragments, Saint George, Utah, 12 March 2019

Je pleure

As sweet as Adam
And as old as Eve,
We are gone and we

Are going to go.
There’s never been a weapon
More cruel and absurd
Than an ordinary sword,

Than an ordinary word.
Secluded figures
Of great talent
Were long a Chinese fashion,

But talent for seclusion
Meant dodging the flaming sword
To reverse the words.

Je désire

The animal wants offspring.
The animal wants nothing
But an end to the longing

To continue, to belong
To the beyond. The beyond
Is an animal
Of another kind,

Of an angor animi,
Or of being, left behind.
Oh, if we weren’t animals,
Oh, if we were not at all,

Wouldn’t it be easier
To be and to surrender
To whatever had the gall?

Je diminue

What do you need?
I need nothing.
What do you want?
I want nothing.
What do you seek?
I seek nothing.
What can you touch?
Nothing much.

Never Mind the Signpost, California, 11 March 2019

After clambering away

From all the other tourists

Desperate to be alone

With disinterested nature,

Through the pink monkey flower,

Parish poppies, purple sand

Verbena, yellow evening

Primrose, and the ghost flowers,

We waded back in the sand

To the side of the paved road,

Climbed into the car and drove

Over the dipping ribbons

Of the patched-up highways, past

Lemon groves and date-palm farms

Northwest of the Salton Sea,

Past the oddball gas station

Of a small intersection

That sold crickets by the box,

Snacks for human consumption,

Past the past that ghosted us,

The time we passed through Needles

As an intact family

Dragging a trailer,

Five years earlier,

Daughter a toddler,

Past but not past everything,

Memories making

Dented memories

Of words moving and breathing.

Borrego Springs, California, 10 March 2019

Vultures, hawks, and butterflies circled
Under contrail lines as the desert blossomed
From Needles, past Iron Mountain, to Borrego:
After the rare rich winter rains, the bloom.
The first thick patch of purple, white, and gold
By the side of the highway was so lavish, so
Garishly colorful, eyes momentarily mistook it
For a floral roadside memorial like those spectacular
Displays common two states east, in New Mexico.
Hordes of small butterflies caromed around
The air above the road, so many, like flies,
Like migrating storms of wildebeest, but winged,
So many that every passing car was a massacre,
Bright golden smears splattering the windshield,
Streaking the hood. Daughter later plucked a dozen
Corpses, wings intact, out of the grille. Life.

The Little Hours Over Hop Valley, Utah, 9 March 2019

A leap of faith to find the little ones
Lost in extravagant allegories
Of death and the most gruesome agonies,
Hiding high up in the caves on the cliffs.
They don’t ever want to come back down,
They never want to come back down, but
They must if they are not to turn to dust.
Even the denizens of allegories, indigenes
Of mysteries, inhabitants of wonder stories,
Need to come down to the valley to dream.
A span of two weeks included five days
Spent largely lost and hidden in the heights.
Each quiet spread its tendrils deeper, deeper
Into the mind of the past. As close to heaven
As all that, it couldn’t last, but when the wind
Shoved clouds away, above the empty path,
Sunlight answered for everything asked.

Quail Creek Reservoir, 8 March 2019

Apologies to Frege, but the mystery is not
How the thought becomes flesh, but how
Rocks become flesh become thought, how
Thought first began to float free of the flesh,
A wanderer, roaming around the rocky world
From body to body, inn to inn, surveying
And marking trails through the dark forests,
Arriving this morning at a red-rock reservoir
Brimming with heavy, late-winter rains, migrating
Birds, and Frege. The mystery drifting under
The crying waterfowl, who have to keep thoughts
Mostly to themselves, is when will the wanderer
Be freed from flesh brooding and sheltering
Thoughts of mysteries in the flesh, free to leave?

Low Visibility, Kolob Terrace, Utah, 7 March 2019

The flash-flood warnings were rolling in,
Along with the roiling creeks, liquid mud.
Dense fog descended at noon. Extrinsic
Mortality due to inclement weather became,
Once again, possibility. A few days earlier,
Tornadoes had obliterated a town in Alabama.
Montana had set a March record, minus 40.
Whenever weather dominates local news,
Whenever everyone starts comparing notes
Of their own alarming encounters—“my son
Woke me up to tell me he could hear the creek.
I sent him back to bed. I told him, it’s not when
You hear the creek you have to worry, yet.
It’s when you can smell it”—thoughts turn
To my own mother, whose dirt-poor farming
Childhood in New England in the Depression,
A childhood of hand-pumped water, outhouses,
Wood stoves, ice and snow storms, maybe
Played a part in her late-life obsession with weather
On cable TV. She could sit for hours, glued
To updates on hurricanes, tornadoes, killer
Heat waves, even displays of any records set,
But especially floods and blizzards. Her children
And her grandchildren sometimes joked about it.
I did. Weather destroys nowhere near as many
Lives as guns, guns nowhere near as many
As infections, infections now lagging cancer.
My mother herself died of general collapse
And senescence, indoors in fine summer weather,
By then oblivious to any news, even of storms.
But people will perish of weather by nightfall,
Somewhere, by nightfall every night and again
Before morning. I’ve lived long enough now
To have known neighbors who later froze
To death or vanished under a rock slide. Hikers
And campers die here in Zion every year.
Another warning to stay out of flood-prone
Areas then lit up my phone, cell service alerts
Reaching out through the foggiest high country.
I grinned and remained on the side of the road.

Feoffment with Livery of Seisin, Snow Canyon, Utah, 6 March 2019

I snap a twig from the dry tree next to me.

In a few days it will be spring, which means

So many things. I dig down in the soft sand

Of the damp wash and bury the twig, along

With a coin. I pronounce the magic words,

Invoke the magic name of my mythical king.

Now and forever, for all my heirs, I own this

Land. No one else knows this, but it’s true.

I own the dark green scrub, the broken stone.

I own the sky now polishing its clouds. I own

This basalt outcrop, this cottonwood, this

Poem. Because I am not the poet, am not any

One of the creatures that pass through here,

Not even the land, which can never be mapped

By me exactly, anyway. I am the name that I am,

And I own, the moment I name. Spring. I am.

LaVerkin, Utah, 5 March 2019

Three white women, permed white heads
Like dandelion cotton, carry on a conversation
Over lunch in a corner of the Stagecoach Grille.
After an initial discussion of the hazards
Of dying, which all three agree are worse
Than death, they switch topics, declaring
The shortcomings of the young. One woman
Seems particularly exercised about education,
Especially foreign-language immersion programs
For elementary schoolchildren. She starts in
On a complaint about her grandson indulging
In this pernicious fashion for his own kids,
Illustrating their foolishness with complaints
Against the arrogance of his chidren’s teachers
In Mandarin immersion classes. “Chinese!
Can you believe it? Chinese! They’re too young
For that. Let them learn their own thing, first,
Then later they can take another language
If that’s what they want, in high school. And now
They’ve got all these Spanish schools. You know why?
They want to make our kids learn Spanish
Because they refuse to learn English, all these
Hispanics coming into white neighborhoods.”
She goes on for a bit like that, with general agreement
That even if it’s right to feel sorry for “the Hispanics,”
“We should be helping them in their own countries,
Not letting them pour into ours.” Somehow,
This gets the three onto the topic of all the guns
Being purchased by another woman’s grandson.
She understands he needs to keep himself safe,
The way things are, but he’s wasting his money
Buying so many more guns than he needs. “I tell him,
You better not tell anyone you have all those guns,
And you better lock them all up in a safe, or someone
Will be coming for them, and maybe for you, too.”
Three heads bob assent. Something’s always coming.

Sun in the Clouds over Zion, 4 March 2019

In the world of the signaling, singing, weeping apes,
There’s always another binary debate. Today,
As handsome flotillas of clouds flared their sails
In the sun, swanning along the afternoon between
Rains that just were and the rains yet to come,
One could root out from bookstores, screens,
And magazines an either/or fallacy about progress
And the apocalypse. We are, to be sure, accelerating
And our acceleration keeps accelerating by jerks,
As our numbers grow and our nurdles pile up,
As our depredations intensify and our artifice
Talks to itself. What does this mean? Where
Will we go? When we will go and be gone?
One camp specializes in focusing on disasters,
Although oddly almost always picking only one
To identify as The One: the bomb, the climate,
The trash, the robots, the population, the plague,
The genetic engineering, the coming famine.
The other camp combs through the past
And comes up with graphs, graphs on graphs,
Showing the good numbers climbing, the bad
Items—violence, disease, starvation, crime—
In erratic but mostly continuous decline.
Humans. We want to think we’ll all be gone
Tomorrow, or else we’ll thrive and rocket around.
Don’t we ever face the feeling we’ll sink only
Slowly, slowly, like rain on already wet ground?

Thunderstorm in the Parking Lot, Saint George, Utah, 3 March 2019

The past, the future, and the invisible danced
Like happy angels on the ranked windshields
Of the parked trucks and cars. Cloud-to-cloud
Lightning brightly underlined the darkening
Of the lowering afternoon sky. “Time to die,”
Said one particularly batty angel to a demon
Gasping next to him. But the rest pranced,
Content to exchange sky for glass and steel,
For a change. Change keeps things happening,
Living or barely moving, angels, birds, ghosts,
Lightning in the mountains or the mountains,
Dying or coming to life. “At last! I am alive!”
Gasped another angel, splat. The invisible,
The future, and the past. Splish, splash, splat.

Divination Near the End of Winter, 2 March 2019

Listen to the lack of messages. Let the lack
Wash over you. Ourselves aside, this seems
Like anything but an ominous cosmos.
The distant rhythm of a raven’s throat,
Which would be obnoxious were it up close,
And the much more distant fading rumble
Of a passenger jet, which would be a scream
On approach, both drop away into nothing.
Neither one was saying anything. Divination,
True divination, surrenders planned futures
To all the meaningless sounds in passing
And understands the best prediction is change,
Change, message-less change, more and more
Of the same saying nothing and never the same.

No Additional Text, 1 March, 2019

The smell of snowmelt soaking the sandstone
Mud flats in the sun. The doe brushing her back
Against the juniper as another doe watches her
Without comment. The glance at the cracked face
Of the cliff, the smooth face of the watch. The clutch
In the gut that all this was yesterday, alone, calm,
And now it’s time to put it out of mind, to teach
About collective knowledge and the transition
To state societies, to answer rafts of questions
For a class packed into a room of painted bricks.
Maybe I don’t want the world to speak
To me, anymore. Its speechlessness sounds
Sweeter now. It's silence I’ve come to listen for.