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.

Muddy River Diner, Moapa, Nevada, 8 April 2019

Li Bai stopped at pubs a lot.
He liked to get drunk.
He liked to tip the singers.
He liked to hear the folk songs.

No folk songs in Nevada,
Not counting streaming country
Pop or the siren jingles
Of three dusty slot machines.

How would an asyntactic,
Calligraphic, terse,
But soulful Chinese poet

Find his way in this setting?
Five diners. Windows. Five words.
Wine. Server. Busboy. Talk. Birds.

No, we can’t do it.
We can’t be asyntactic
And imagistic
And soulful and rhyme.

We don’t have the pictographs,
The Mandarin, the folk songs
Stored up in us in order

To accomplish
The lyric equivalent
Of binding our feet.
And we’re just not drunk.

The busboy complains
To the middle-aged server
That although he’s great
Making friends with other guys

He just can’t make it
With the girls. The server laughs,
And then she explains to him,

“All you gotta do’s relax.”
Outside arched windows
Occasional birds fly by.

For My Introductory Anthropology Students in Saint George, Utah, Who Often Look Bemused, 7 April 2019

Envision a human as a sailboat, with culture for the sails and biology for the rudder and hull. You can’t reduce a sailboat to a rudder and hull, especially not if you want to explain how it sails, but, if you reduce it to its sails, then it’s no longer a boat and the sails go nowhere at all.

There are lots of other sorts of boats afloat that are not sailboats. Think of all the other living creatures without human culture as these sorts of boats without sails. Most of them have rudders and all of them have hulls. Now, a human in full sail, a conquering fleet of humans, is a glorious, exhilarating, awesome, extinguishing, and probably colonizing sight to behold. But any fleet can still be sunk by storms or other fleets with sails. Even canoes can have a go. And every boat sinks once its hull’s breached, no matter how full and fine are the sails.

Cultural differences, of course, would be differences in sails. A whole hull under torn sails drifts sadly and is likely to be abandoned. Unless it’s a Viking longboat, with lots of oars and hordes of hairy homunculi to pull them. Then, although it should avoid the open seas, it will still haul itself up deltas and do serious damage to the locals despite the tattered rags of its one colorful sail.

Hulls are not destiny. Anchors can be lifted. Rudders can split. Never blame poor or fancy sailing on the hull. Of course, some Polynesian sails have double hulls below their platforms and are more stable and can more safely cross open oceans than can sails that pull only one hull. It’s not destiny, never destiny, but still. You have to admire some hulls.

Remember that your parents don’t necessarily sew much of your sails, although they did provide the hull. Hulls—well, and masts, too, let’s be honest—come from the dark forest. But sails can be made of various textiles, and whenever you spot elaborately imbricated sets of sails catching the wind in a yacht race, however strong your aesthetic response, bear in mind the vast network of power relations that produced their significations. Let the horror of the race dawn, staggering your mind.

What? No, not that kind of race. That race concept belongs to the sails, not the hull, by the way. A yacht race here is just part of our conceit. No, not conceited, it's--Someone had a hand up? No? Never mind.

Anyway. Everybody got it? Good. Now let’s consider kinship.

Shaggy Barguest Stories in Zion, 6 April 2019

An angel, a bear, a dog, a baby, and a monkey
Walk into a body. A body, self, and puppet
Walk into a committee meeting. A ghost,
A poem, and an angel bump into a god.
A self, a soul, a mind, words, and portable devices
Stroll into a book. Chance, pollution, purity,
Danger, what might happen, and what comes
After walk into a bar together. The language
Of religiosity persists, long after the faith
Has deceased. Oh God, my God, why must
Thou inhabit me? A monk, a rabbi, a sadhu,
And a priest march into the river. The ferryman
Looks up from his nap and, after scrutinizing
Them for a moment as they wade and begin
To sink, observes, “I see you folks can’t afford
A lift, but is there something you want to drink?”

Not New Harmony, Utah, 5 April 2019

Even better yet, it’s a mistake. New Harmony
Is a community of a couple hundred souls,
Twenty kilometers or so due west. For a route
With roads, it's maybe forty, forty-five minutes
Up and around from Virgin by car, on the far side
Of the interstate, edge of Pine Valley Wilderness.
The old Harmony was Fort Harmony, washed out
When its adobe walls melted in the Great Flood
Of 1862. So there. The software triangulates
To the nearest municipality in a straight line,
And at some point in the middle of these cliffs
Without any town or village near, it flips
From labeling this Virgin to stating New Harmony,
Although here’s well outside the bounds of either.
It’s odd, perhaps, that the mapping engineers
Chose to configure the software’s program
To assign town names to current locations that way,
But it’s not wholly their fault and not at all
The fault of the software. Blame the nature
Of names. New Harmony’s boundaries are
Arbitrary as any noun’s, any label’s, and it is not
Only difference that distinguishes difference,
Not only that New Harmony cannot be Virgin,
But that there are vast expanses of experience
To which no names apply, neither Fort nor New
Nor Virgin nor Harmony nor Zion nor the difference
Between any of them, but necessarily outside.
I’ve driven past the actual speck of New Harmony
Maybe a hundred times. Never saw the exit sign.

The Logical Unity of Contradictory Pleas to Remain in Memory, Utah, 4 April 2019

I am neither one principle nor two.
I am all principles of me as you,
Of us as facts that make true statements true,
Of us as possessions we can accrue,
Possessions we longed for when we were new,
Possessions we still consume to renew,
All our selves we will lose without a clue,
Not even looked for anymore, our due.

Every moment marks a turn in the way
Of understanding, as well as a way
Of understanding we can never say
We understand again. We are at play
In games of our own making, night and day,
Nothing, no one, no two, remaining. Stay.

Books Are a Kind of Dream Sleep in Pine Valley, Utah, 3 April 2019

Most marriages made for love have also been arranged by the lovers
For convenience. We mustn’t say so, but it’s true. Repenting
At leisure, later, we try to figure how to raise the whole arrangement
Like an old barn under new roof. Just when we think we understand
Something, we peel off another layer of paint and find complications
Wriggling, our private nest of thriving termites underneath. Anything
To serve love’s swollen, droning royalty, who alone preserve our colony.
We see that there’s something more we’re missing and that we can’t see
Clearly what it is. All convenient arrangements in the name of love,
Or faith, or art, are equally aspirational simulacra of the condition
We hope someday to be in, to have been in. The transformation
May not be miraculous, may begin, but rarely does it complete itself.
Leave off the mind-reading and attend to the movements
And responses of the myriad partnered things. Intertwining
Exchanges and alterations produce a great diversity of wriggling
Differences under the skin of any tranquil scene. We can try.
We can try to change our minds. We can make love
Because love is an art, a faith, a thing that must be made. Once,
We dreamed of being snapped up for a song by a somebody
With an uncontrollable urge to string us along. Artifice. Now,
We have to leave behind the home we then arranged. We may
Yet save ourselves, keep the well-foxed library, dream, but we can’t
Fix love’s twisting, falling beams. And we must share the offspring.

Jerome’s Dream, Baker Dam Reservoir, Utah, 2 April 2019

Signs and natural wonders commingled familiarly.
Words on screens translated from words on paper
Translated from words on vellum translated
From parchment scrolls translated from clay
Sauntered and sashayed through the thoughts of the day,
The immediately recent, typically southern Utah day,
Where the eroding sand smelled damp by the pond
Dammed up and brown, surrounded by its fringe
Of cottonwoods at the receding spring shore,
Ridges of juniper-piñon receding away,
Last year’s leaves fluttering like small creatures
On the ground, so light and silvery grey, they seemed
Like litter reflecting the sun, like lizards when they skittered.
An actual lizard skittered. A raven announced
And was answered repeatedly by a put-upon scrub jay.
A jet dragged a contrail and its subsequent grumble overhead.
A cigarette butt, a skein of discarded paper wrapper,
A piece of glass emerged from the sand as actual
Litter. Nothing much. Sit close enough to the margins
And you could listen to the little riplet waves the breezes made.
Poor Saint Jerome, irascible fanatic, one of the best
Figures to symbolize his transitional age, one of the last
Romans to start out pagan, to receive a classical education.
He dragged his library into the desert. He tortured himself.
He tortured the women who believed in his vision
Of virginity, celibacy, suffering, starvation. He learned
Arabic and Syriac, Hebrew from actual Jews.
He translated frantically, too fast, too polemically.
Eventually a mob of other angry Christians
Burned even his library, as they burned down so many.
He died blindly working on one last commentary.
Along the way, early on, he had a fever dream
That Jesus was actually beating him for preferring
Pagan literature to the reading of translated scriptures,
For being a Ciceronian. He vowed never to read
The old Romans again. Later, he made excuses,
Used the Deuteronomist no less, to make them, and read.
Mostly he made contentious, scholarly, biased translations
That shaped the world to come for centuries, a millennium,
His idiosyncratic translations of texts ancient in his day, made
From parchment made from papyrus and sheepskin translations
Of impressions made in damp and then baked-hard clay.
By the little pond in the desert scrub when the breezes played
His signs, translated and translated again, into a language
Nonexistent in his day, through a medium nonexistent
In his day, continued to beat him down among the wonders
Of this part of the world he would never have guessed,
Part never mentioned by his Jesus, although settled
By those whose Jesus they believed came by here once,
To a far-off, unholy, Christless, ordinary day.
A long, black bird floated down to the actual lake.

April Fools, New Harmony, Utah, 2019

You think it’s today, but it’s yesterday, always.
You think you think, but it was thought thought you,
Perhaps thanks not even to memory but
Mostly, vide Tononi, to densely patterned integration
Of synthesized information, including the recent,
That which you call, hah, the now, the today,
And the ancient you call all your foolish yesterdays.
You are there, now. You were here, then. You’ve been
The pattern that declares itself aware of self since, well,
Whenever. Well, I never. And you? You park your white
Toyota Tacoma with Washington plates to discuss
If this is a good spot for a hike. Together, you
Decide yes, pop in and out of the truck like gophers,
Getting your gear, refilling your water bottles,
Applying white sunscreen to the edges of your ears,
Your young, pink, perfectly healthy ears. Your franchised,
Well-made, well-advertised, recently purchased gear.
Finally, the pair of you disappear. Off into the wild
Blue yonder, pine-green ponderosas, patches
Of old snow, stretches of empty, buff sandstone
Bluff. Yesterday was the first day; today is the Fool’s Day.
I’ll wait for you to return before sunset, in case. You’ll wander
Back in, runny noses, empty water bottles, and cold skin.
You’ll wonder why I’m still perched here, what kind of fool I am.
While you’re gone, a bushy-haired old German man appears,
Peering over the edge after you. A passerine shrieks. Wind.
The seasonal stream of snowmelt braids dreams.  We all tried
To save you today, but it seems like only yesterday, it seems.