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,
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,
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.
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