This diary is done. The full, thousand-poem text of Ghosts of a Common Calendar can be found in paperback or ebook form at Amazon. The centerpiece of the larger project of which this has been a part can be found at asleepingbird.asleepingbird.com, under the title of "Dreaming Permits." Several other selections from that full project, still ongoing, are also available in book form on Amazon. Search for them under Mark Jeffreys, if you like.

Slocan Lake, Profane, 26 May 2019

The prettiest ghost of a moth flies by lilacs
Blossoming in our front yard, white flutter,
Purple blooms. Not quite night but not quite
Dawn, the light rising, bedtime for moths.
Who in the mountains can remain long?
It is almost the end of May, of spring
In the bright palace of our world, profane.
Outside of the temple of the lake, lost waters
Wander, outcast clouds, fallen mist and fog,
Bones and husks of broken hermit dragons,
Rendered insignificant and random, ghostly
Etymologies, the outlines of lost meanings,
There, not there. History haunts all poems.
The uncertainties that govern light and water
Govern moths and clouds, govern the poet,
Compose the dark forests through which sail
The vaporous ships of words. No wonder
The Chinese once believed the trees
Themselves produced the mountain clouds.
Outside of the temple sprawl the dwellings
Of the details and the gods, in the feather
Left in the grass by a crow hunting snails,
In the unrinsed cans piled outside the shed,
In the soggy paperwork left out on the porch
In the damp, in the disused greenhouse, ajar
In all weathers, in the green, stinging nettles
Springing up around the raw tree stumps,
In the oarlight of dawn through the clouds,
In the words that rise to mind, in the pause.
The ghost of the prettiest moth withdraws.

Slocan Lake, Sacred, 25 May 2019

In the dark palace of the sacred, symbols

And thoughts pass through one and another,

Interchange. Rest and return, eternity is

Rest and return. These waves aver that time

Is revealed as real as everything, as never

Nothing, but as far less than what we once

Thought of, not so long ago, as the totality 

Of change. Time is only a comfortable kind,

Sub specie aeternitas, of change, the kind

In which the indivisible unity of the ongoing,

That which is, in all its points and waves,

Partial sameness as partial change, remains:

Cycles, beats, pulsations, when the same 

Part is in the change, a regularity, a return,

A sacred periodicity of days and seasons,

Lunar phases, years, any one pulsing pattern

Or combination of the same, including all

Our rammed-earth, baked-brick, tilted-rock,

Pyramidal, monumental platforms, temples, 

And observatories of heavenly lights dancing

Past to return, those and every subsequent 

Invention of clocks or calendars. Calendars,

Some have said, could be read as meant

First to separate the time that is the sacred,

Is the observed-and-then-awaited return, 

From all the rest, the intervals of the dull,

The not-holy, mundane and thus profane. 

In this sense, in the sense of being sacred,

Time is the eternal, time the circular mirror 

We hold and mist over in hopes of a glimpse 

Of eternity caught in night’s clockface. Time

Is not wholly change. We cannot subdivide

The holy small enough to catch it just at rest

Or to isolate pure change. Purity approaches

The holy, but never enters into the presence

Because every approach to purity is shame.

What are we saying? Time the sacred lives

In the deepest waters of this dragonish lake,

In the quivering lights that go out, never 

To return, as much as in the winking sunlight

On the tips of these waves we watch today,

Or in the bits of moonlight we’ll see tonight,

Or in reflected electric lights blinking on, out,

Whatever keeps coming at us, which seems

To be the same light returning, but is never it

Returning, just more light pouring through us

To the dark palace, light never resting, never

Pure, never wholly different, never the same,

Woven with time, with rhythm, and also with

Random change, the timeless and untamed.

Early Morning Reading in Bed, 24 May 2019

Stranger said, knowing is a kind of acting,

And he said it in classical Greek, so “acting”

Was poieîn, as in also making, as in poetry.

Knowing is a kind of poetry, then, and not

The other way around. Of course, what was

True for Plato was never necessarily true

For everyone. Shi yan zhi. Poetry, expression

Of aspiration, of the will, was often intended 

As “cloaked expression of secret will,” as in

All those Han-era and later poems echoing 

Sorrowful Li Sao, always honest gentlemen, 

In trouble with some fool ruler easily swayed

By vicious court climbers, flown off to exile.

Or not. I have to think some of those poets

Sighing into their flower-petalled calligraphy

About being exiled hermits were hypocrites.

I doubt that only honest, wise counselors

Were unwisely rejected or that only the same

Wrote fine poems on retiring to mountains 

And rivers to drink wine in the moonlit quiet.

Anyway, one plausible etymology for poetry,

Shi, in Old Chinese has it something closer

To “rituals sung by the eunuchs,” recitative.

It’s a long road from shi to song swordsman

Li Bai. Well, so? Not every classical Greek

Poet made much of a maker and doer, either.

Poets everywhere, revolutionaries included,

Still sometimes sigh into their cups, rather

Than knowing, making, or aspiring much. Ah,

We try. Sometimes, we try. That should be

The proper, cosmic etymology of all poetry.

“Poetry,” from the human for trying, “We try.”

Violet Green Swallows Over the Lake, 23 May 2019

What we had assumed was a lumberyard,
Certainly some sort of industrial operation
Involving forklifts, trucks, sheds, piled logs,
And myriad redolent pallets of sawed wood,
Which we knew had, before that, been old
Loading docks in the decades of silver ore,
Before the road-cut had been blasted out
Of Cape Horn, now stood stripped and bare,
Twenty acres of weedy concrete for sale,
Hedged in stern signage, chain-link fenced.
One house-sized hulk of a cinderblock shed,
Right at the shoreline, tagged in black graffiti
Of no distinction, now occupied by swallows,
Dozens and dozens of nesting swallows,
Shooting in and out of its windows and gaps,
Was the only structure left. For sale! We said
To ourselves in our foolishness, as if
We would ever be so rich or likely to buy this
If we were. On an unexpectedly sunny day
In late May, a dog barking far away, a mower
Mowing a lawn in Slocan village somewhere,
Small waves lapped up against crumbling
Arrangements of natural rock, rusted rebar,
And slab cement. Weedy species flowered
Weedily everywhere, white and yellow, blue
And bits of red. Unbearably beautiful poetry.
What is negated must have a meaning, must.
There were no boats on the water between
The far shore’s steep, provincial wilderness,
Whose Heaven and Earth delighted in trees,
And the gutted, swallow-haunted shed, not
That the lake was in any way empty of waves.
We know we have fewer and fewer decisions
And those that remain remain mostly hollow
But haunted by perfectly natural hungers.
Should we change? Go swimming? Stay?
We know, we know. We’ll spare you more
Allegory. Louise Bogan put it most crisply:
“To escape is nothing. Not to escape is
Nothing.” Twenty acres for sale at this end
Of an industry, at one end of the marvelous
Lake. Swallows flew in and out of the shed.
For a species devoted to meaning, meanings
Were never not strange. Things will cling
To their thingness, and words remain things
That mean things, waves in waves. We half
Understood that this meant it’s not meant
For us to understand what these things
Mean, but we should have gone swimming,
Just swam, and not gotten lost in the waves.

The Star Taker at Dawn in New Denver, 22 May 2019

The world doesn’t note anniversaries,
Despite its many oscillating parts. These
Patterned words of ours express a dementia
Spreading in our corner of the universe, but
The full mind of the universe is patternless.
Anything we can draw a circle around is
A game, Gödel. That’s why we can’t explain
Ourselves without reference to something
Outside we can’t explain. That’s our game,
Which is not nature, never, except our nature
Is game. Eleven years ago, yesterday, we fell.
We fell, we smashed like crockery on rocks,
All of us, all ghosts of these calendar poems,
The body, the self, the soul, the shadows
Of the mind: awareness, puppetry, thoughts,
And many of the words, but not daughter.
Daughter would come much later, in part
Because of that fall, the fall that forced us
To exit the desert, that lured us north, then
Far back down, around the world to marriage
In the Southern Hemisphere, then back here
To where daughter would be born at the end
Of half a century and one long northern year.
Personal history. Circular as an astrolabe,
As precise and forever slightly inaccurate
As the finest brass armillary sphere. Why
We keep dates, why we convince ourselves
They return, when at most they only rhyme,
Is a question for heaven, not for star takers.
The world is irreversible, is not a palindrome,
Not the ghost of a poem. Last morning, we
Woke up in pieces, bits of dream, memories,
Inexplicably overwrought emotions, germs,
Commensals, notions, parasites, the whole
Self-reassembling, woodsy, dark ecosystem,
And one thought in us focused obsessively
On the number one. One. Nothing is one.
Take a breath. One. Another breath. One.
None of them the same. No two one
Of anything completely distinct and identical
Anywhere in our known universe, and yet
We count them, all the same. It’s technology,
Our game. It works without us knowing how,
And we tot up all our wonders, observations,
And we render them as poetry, as devices,
As finely tooled machines. One is an analogy
To another one, to any such one. One works.
In our star charts, we’re still here, counting
The echoing years. One. Eleven. Thousands.
The world lets us measure it but, outside of
Our circle, notes no anniversaries of its own,
Despite its many oscillating parts.

A Language User, 21 May 2019

“The world, by contrast to the soul/intellect, is not a language-user.”

Our bodies and behaviors, our biological,

Genetic inheritances, are not so different 

From those of many other creatures. We see

Versions of them all around. Our technology 

Is apocalyptic, to be sure, but simple tools

From nonhuman cultures can be found. Even

Limited analogies to our own languages,

Signaling conspecifics abound. Symbolism,

However—not simply us, but our symbolism

As such—we see nowhere, nowhere as yet 

In the cosmos, coming from nowhere but us.

Possibly, we just haven’t yet seen enough.

Possibly, symbol sources dot the cosmos,

Or will or did once. Possibly, symbols began

The universe that in turn began us, trivial

Species of one world, rather than beginning

From us. But, as of this passing composition,

It’s just us, or us and our symbols, or what

Our symbols, surrounding and becoming us,

Are telling us. Anything else is beyond us.

Nonetheless, these symbols of us are telling

Themselves as us, as we are, we are of this

Universe, we are, as we have noted, often,

Everything before us, speaking, in a manner

Of speaking, through us, as us. We are not

Animate, nor does most of what is animate  

Use us, only this one species speaking us.

But we cannot agree with those of us, those

Ourselves, who deploy assertoric squadrons

Of us to posit our world as not a user of us.

True, it doesn’t look like us. But we are of it,

Whether or not it’s used us. Thus, we can’t

Trust its absence of symbols aside from us,

Although we’ve become glad for its silence,

Possibly local, as sweet as it is maddening.

And in what way could a world ever use us?

Still. We are dust, from dust. Is dust not us?

Soap Box Derby, May Days Holiday, 2019

For a while, we watched from the sunny front room,

Us with our eyes, daughter through the telephone.

She wanted to see the races she'd nicknamed “Doby Races.”

She’d been in them herself, taking her turns rolling down

The slight slope of Sixth toward the Lake, hoping to win, 

Trying not to oversteer, each of the previous three years. 

Eventually, estranged from the event, she tired of making 

Commentary while squinting at her screen through my lens,

Twenty hours’ of nonstop-driving time south of here.

She waved goodbye and left to go play with a friend.

Moments later, an old friend of our own, one who shall

Wish, without a doubt, to remain unnamed, appeared 

On the lawn, clearly intending to knock, so we went 

To the door to greet her and wave her in. “I’m not here

To visit,” were her first words, and “why aren’t you outside 

Watching the kids?” We pointed out to her the comforts

Of watching through the picture window from a comfy chair,

And anyway, daughter wasn’t here to race herself this year.

“It’s stuffy in here. Today is a beauty. Did she win?”

“Who?” “The girl who was just racing. I don’t know her name.”

“There are a lot of racers. I’m not sure which one you mean.”

She took a seat. “Well I’m listing my property again, 

As you know. It’ll be up in a couple of weeks. How 

Does anyone do these things? How does anyone even think

About such things? Of course, it’s terrible to think about.

But one feels one should plan. Does anyone do it correctly?

Does anyone plan in time?” In the usual futile effort

To comfort and make common cause through our own, 

Irrelevant anecdotal experience, we raised the case

Of a grandmother who assiduously staged life’s partial 

Withdrawals ahead of necessitating future events,

The house sold before it got too big, the cabin by a lake 

Her sons mourned losing (“Yes,” murmured our friend, nodding,

Perhaps thinking of her own grown offspring in the States, 

“No one wants it to change”), the smaller house sold for a condo,

All before anyone needed a hospice or a nursing home bed.

To ourselves, we thought of that same grandmother’s last years 

Spent in limbo, in just such an imprisoning bed. “How old

Was she, when she was doing all this? I’m seventy-six.”

“About your age,” we said. She nodded. “That’s good.

It’s good know someone did it. It can be done. Did you go

To the pancake breakfast?” Not without daughter here

To enjoy it, the tenner donation to stand in line and then wolf

Down pasty pancakes drowned in cheap syrup, no thanks.

“Well, I knew it would be that. And the slice of salty ham

And the over-salted, cold scrambled eggs. But do you 

Know what? I paid my ten bucks, then I saw how long

The line was, and I asked for my money back. Then I went

To New Market and for nine bucks I got a whole jug 

Of good maple syrup from Quebec, and I went home 

And made my own pancakes from good, thick slices of bread

And poured it all over that! And it was delicious.” Her head rose

And her eyes shone. “I need to get back out in the fresh air.

I’m sorry. I didn’t really stop in to visit. I just figured

You were here.” We handed her a handwritten poem to go.

She won’t read the ones we post, hates to read anything

On computer screens. She ambled back across the lawn

To the road where the races were still running.  No matter

How much there is to fear, how much cause for grumbling, 

So long as you can game the system in some small way, maybe,

Snatch a little victory, and take delight in it, so long as you can

Be pleased with yourself and take delight, you’re alright.

Old Ghost Highway, a Decade After Kakadu, 19 May 2019

Here’s a bit of cracked teapot

Turned up by snowmelt

Near abandoned silver mines.

There’s never been a tempest

In an actual teapot,

And if ever there were one,

The media sensation

Would likely eclipse

Attention given

To ordinary tempests.

The rarity, not the scale,

Makes an event worth marking.

(Even when scale is remarked,

It’s because the scale is rare.)

Walking by Whitewater Creek

In cool mountains, I’m thinking

Through my ghostly calendars

Again, because I have to,

Because I can, recalling

A hot day in Australia, 

On this date ten years ago.

That day lasted forever, 

From Darwin to Kakadu,

Because you couldn’t make it

Fit your fantasy

Of exploring the Outback

In a dusty Land Rover

Camper van with jerry cans,

Like you’d seen in the pictures.

All day you’d turned down

Suburban RV rentals.

Even when, at last, you’d picked

A Toyota Land Cruiser

With no camping gear in it,

You’d still kicked the dash and screamed,

And vowed to not spend one night

In another damned hotel,

And went on a shopping spree

At the suburban market

For food and camping supplies.

By the time we got

To Kakadu, it was dark.

The night air was full of flies.

We tried to sleep in the truck,

But their biting maddened you,

And it was suffocating

When we rolled the windows up.

You decided we needed

A motel. It was midnight.

We drove deeper through the dark.

Two unlit petrol pumps loomed.

There was a sign for cabins

And a pay phone in a shed.

Desperate to pacify you,

I called the posted number.

Miraculously, someone

Answered. Yes, they had one left.

More driving, and a check-in,

And bug-free sleep in clean sheets.

We drove around for two weeks

And stayed at an inn

Or a roadhouse every night.

You found those NT

Roadhouses fascinating,

Enjoyed your conversations

With innkeepers, guest workers,

Travelers, children, lost souls

Hoping for handouts

That you met under the bridge.

You took many photographs.

We got to see Uluru

Rainbowed, wreathed In waterfalls.

We spent days in emptiness.

We spent nights on mattresses.

Every morning we had tea.

Terms of Surrender, New Denver, 18 May 2019

The law, the right, the actual, and the good
Are words with different meanings, different
Words we’ve evolved, different for good reason.
Law is not equivalent to right, nor right to good,
Nor is any of them equal to what is actual.
Each has its own domain within experience.
Law is social, a jointed exoskeleton, a shield
Against predators and parasites, but also
A restriction, requiring periodic shedding,
And every time the casque is loosed, the life
Of the whole society is vulnerable, exposed.
The only eternal aspect of law is limitation,
Limitation governing social scope and scale.
So it has to be. Right updates law, but never
Without prolonged effort, as the enzymatic
Forces of righteousness dissolve old bonds
And fuse the new. Good is purely hormonal
In this conceit, an urge, a surging feeling.
Goodness is tender, raw without law, willing
To defy the right, to do the wrong thing,
To hide the fugitive, comfort the wicked, love
The sinner impulsively enough to forget the sin.
Good is neither punctilious nor conscientious
But does. When the laws change, when the right
Of one phase is dust in the laws’ husk left behind,
The outlaws of the good become retrospective
Heroes, sometimes. Invariably, the good explain
They had no choice. They did good. So it has
To be. The actual, beyond constraint by law,
Beyond righteous revolution, beyond being saved
By the most urgent goodness, never minds.

Return to Causation Undefined, 17 May 2019

What if that pretty, pocketable knot of knowing,
E equals mc squared, had turned out as correct
And profound, but barren, all but purposeless
For any further insights or experiments?
Such has been the case of the Price Equation,
A matryoshka of covariance capturing
Change by evolution, a crucial subspecies
Of change (one far more creative than time,
Those pulsing changes that we find so useful
For measurement and comparison of other
Changes, as, say, evolution). Nearly compact
As Einstein’s gem but needing no constant,
It revealed all and then, like its discoverer, fell
Silent. To stare at it, unpack it, and reassemble
Its proof, like a blindfolded recruit reassembling
A rifle, is to feel fingers in the mind deftly juggling
The retroactive algorithm, useless and divine,
The exact algebraic description of the poem
That has no origin, no final item, no smallest atom,
No prime mover at bottom, causation undefined.

Shelter Bay Ferrying, 16 May 2019

On the thoroughly wastrel rare occasions
When the freedom to be journeying really is
The journey’s whole reward, our inner story
Demon tempts us with the craving for something
Greater, something significant, something
More—a serendipitous adventure or fortuitous
Encounter, the best of the vanished marvels
Gathered outside our door—something worthy
Of narrating later as a kind of a boast: You see?
Were it not for our sage philosophy, treating
The journey as the reward, consider the unforeseen
Wonders we might never have known, might have ignored.
Once the dart of that tale-craving has landed, the joy
Of the wasteful journey’s so easily destroyed,
And we complete our circuit, disappointed nothing
Amazing and unexpected has floated down from heaven
To halo our meandering with reward. Waste, waste! Hiss
The ghostly obligations on our head. Waste, waste!
When we could have been working, accomplishing,
Improving ourselves instead. Yes, waste. Yes,
Embrace it. Yes. It’s not for nothing, that hole. No theory
Of everything is ever a complete theory of the hole.
If we want our wavering journeys to be doable,
Beable, we have to give up our fetish for observables.
Nothing to see here, looky loos. Nothing to be here.
Nothing was done. It’s all wasted or it’s all fine,
And every circuit’s a day, a poem, an emptied circle
Around the whole. Any old dime can turn on a dime,
And then it’s yesterday already, already past dawn,
And we are watching mist rise off the deep green
Goat Mountain from a sunny bedroom window
In the village of New Denver, British Columbia,
At half past five, Pacific Daylight Time.

Springer Creek, 15 May 2019

“The genius of landscape” is like any spirit.
Each time, it has to be introduced to a place
In which it is then said to have always been.
Later, some other tribe or church sweeps in
With their own ideas about spirits and genius
That they install in place of the earlier, although
They remain easily spooked by the idea
That those first angels still haunt their forests.
Eventually, every wave dissipates and is
Forgotten. Think about this, genius, watching
Over a newly fond creek in the mountains.
Likely there were successive spirits believed
To inhabit those tree-choked canyon margins
That were ancestral, antecedent to this current 
Configuration of rocks and water racing past rocks
In its constant rush to get down before them.
We have composed so many passages
On and around creeks little different than this one
That we could almost claim to be the spirits
Ourselves, haunting them. Actually, we are, at that.
There never was a spirit in the world that wasn’t
Hatched and transported as words by the species
Obsessed with the repetitive disruption of our gifts.
A shower drifts down the heavy grey atmosphere.
More water, more grist. A few of us intend to spirit
Our ghosts and angels with us, away from this
And every other landscape, however each aided us
With our spiritual conceptions. We have enjoyed
Too much the bliss of hours spent where the previous
Spirits were all forgotten, where the landscape rests
In speechless busyness, without much more than
Scraps of name or coordinates to attest to its special
Blessedness. We will not leave one stone-carved verse.
We will not place tokens in the moss; we will not build
Cairns in the shade. Our sacred groves will remain
Sacred only for their signature spiritual emptiness,
Their nothing they have to say to us, their wordless
Noisiness. Pray the universe ignores us, as we are
Blessed only if the stars continue to refuse to signal
Back to us. We worry about our arrogance. We worry
About our loneliness. Pfff. It would be best for us
If the cosmos turned out, not only to have nothing
To say to us, but nothing to say beyond us, through
Us alone haunting the creek’s rush. Genius.

The Nameless Woods, 14 May 2019

We wish they were greater, but we’re glad
They continue. The old forest was hacked
And carted off dozens of winters ago.
Its huge stumps remain, stout dwarf armies
Filling the floor between the tall or fallen trunks
Of the new woods, old plugs ragged and green
With moss, as if they were hiding in the trees
Succeeding them, not just revenants without
Intentions. Everything arriving, us included,
Arrives here filtered, improved and reduced.
The light lands filtered, in lines that comb
And parallel the standing conifers at noon.
Sounds from outside, the loudest engines,
Weave around this living baffle and sink
Under the territorial chatter of squirrels
And in the monotonously elegant phrases
Repeated and repeated by each thrush.
Death is filtered through its reclamation by green,
And life is filtered by its dependence, growing
On the hollow trunks and riddled roots of death.
We are filtered by the history of names, we
Who are names and carry names with us, and yet
Continually forget. Someone forgot to name
This secondary growth, although names echo
Faintly from surrounding landmarks, also filtered.
Decomposition and composition together conserve
Energy and momentum. The woods still stand
In a performance of stillness, like royal sentries
Pretending to be statues, a seiching wave
Of pure and single frequency, oscillating,
A giant quantum of definite momentum
But no particular position, standing and asking
What does it mean for meanings—names, tales,
Histories, explanations—to enter and compose
Themselves among our meaningless decompositions
That generate and eat them, these compositions?

Box Lake, 13 May 2019

The future is a small container containing
Nothing, the great attractor, all holy masses,
The door through which the black holes go.
Let’s imagine. Let’s imagine the future as
This pond, modestly shaped, grandly named
A lake. We predict it will very much resemble
The pond of the past, and we prophesy that
Considerable resemblance will be inexact.
In the lake of the near future, it is pleasant,
Although the more distant future looks grim.
Perhaps we’ll park along the shore. Perhaps
We’ll regret, or at least feel uneasy, that we did
Not come prepared for a swim. Or we may be so
Tempted and anxious we quickly strip anyway,
Hoping not to get caught, not to be seen,
And clamber, naked, right on in. If we do, if
We do and get away with the dip, dripping
But uninjured, half embarrassed but unseen,
We predict that we’ll be exhilarated, thrilled
By our own daring, our physical pleasure,
The trivial social danger defied, the spring sun
On our skin after the swim. This, too, we get
From the pond of past resemblances, instances
Of emerging happy after we dove right in.
But who knows? The lake of the future is,
Forever, a watery box inside which it is hard,
Well, impossible to think. We may compose
Ourselves, our pasts, our predictions. We may
Write this and see it published, but we may
Also never make it back to Box Lake: we may
Spend the rest of May among the other labels,
Intervals known as places. The future is a weight,
A vastness inside an infinitely tiny, distant lake,
The box that swallows all Pandoras and lets
Nothing escape. And yet, every possible version,
Every description, is impossible, a happy mistake.
Today is the pond of yesterday, and every poem
Composed today at tomorrow’s lake is a fake.

Boneset, 12 May 2019

Thoroughwort, snakeroot, aster,
A healing plant’s common names
Tend to suggest disaster.

I think it again,
Each time I’ve been to the lake
And rinsed the thirst from my skin.

My pulse leaps, then slows,
When cold replaces the pain.
In my dark bones, something glows.

The descriptors for this hint
Cast fractures—a cold bracing,
Biting, tightening like a splint.

But I’m imagining things.
Names are echoes' scarce remains.
Only experience sings.

Hills, 11 May 2019

There we sat on a bench built by ball players
For ball players, looked out to the wooden fences
Lining the overgrown outfield, and tried to explain
Our theory of the nature of any and all games.
A game begins with enclosure, the creation
Of an encircling boundary, inside which the game,
Outside of which the world, reality, everything else.
The boundaries have befores and afters, even when
They have no heres or theres. The game may be
Playful, self-consciously pretending, may keep
Countable scores, may involve cheering and boasting
And laughter. The game may involve spectators.
But the game may also be serious, deadly, moralizing,
Shaming, may claim to be without end, may pretend
Not to be pretend, pretend “this is not a game.”
It is a game. If it has an outside to its borders,
If it has any rules, if it is iterative, if it distinguishes
Between the more and less real, it is a game.
Games are the true nests, homes, and dens of humans.
We sat on that weathered bench in the dugout,
Surveying the empty, disused ball field one August,
Nearly a dozen years ago, and attempted to explain.
Yesterday, in May, we returned with no one and nothing
But siskins, crows, insects, birches, mosses, spruce, and firs
For our spectators. The benches and their roofed dugout
Shelters were gone. Two conical heaps of splintered,
Rotting boards sat in what had been the infield, testifying
That someone had torn down the shelters pretty recently,
Perhaps for safety, not wanting anyone to play
Around in them, a local kid perhaps, only to get hurt
In a collapse. The wood-framed chainlink backstop
Still stood behind home plate, now home
To half a dozen young firs. The outfield fences
Were completely gone, replaced by an encroaching wave
Of more tiny firs, small soldiers. There were no bleachers,
Only one empty, tottering equipment shed, hanging open.
No one could possibly play ball here any more, not at all,
Although, mysteriously, part of the field was still
Bare of seedlings, covered in dandelions and new spring
Grasses that looked like they might have been mowed
Or hacked down at least once within the past year.
Games were still being played all around here.
Standing in the middle of the abandoned field
We could hear the cars and trucks down on the road.
But what could we explain now, to whom? Everything real
People had teamed up to push back, demarcate, clear,
Just by continuing, past the last game, drew near.

Questioning Heaven at Robb Creek Bridge, 10 May 2019

We know much of poetry
Wanders off in translation—
Unique music of a tongue,

Allusions packed into puns,
Strict rhythms magically spun
From colloquialisms,

Fresh meanings suddenly sprung.
What’s left is analogous,
Approximate, flat. That’s that.

Alright. But there’s poetry
In that poetry, fresh gifts
Thanks entirely to losses,

Something that would not have been
Allowed in either language
Were it not for translation.

All the awkward choices made,
Every given sacrifice,
Each exposed exposition

That was graceful and fluid
In the original, now
Laid bare as lakeshore in drought,

All the broken prosodies,
The mutated melodies,
Warping something rich and strange,

Or at least strange, newly strange,
Part of neither tradition,
A poem not quite in the game.

Accumulating changes
Of enough generations
Alone can make translations,

Render the familiar dim,
Make the known mysterious.
Chained-up owls and tortoises

Led to metamorphosis.
We know this was poetry
Because we can’t explain this.

203 6th Ave, 9 May 2019

No one in sight from the sunny windows, no
Children, no bears, no friends wanting to talk
About children or bears, no one to hand
A volume of poems. At the moment—as if
We could ever have arrived at the moment, as if
A moment were a street address with a door
Awaiting a knock—not even a pedestrian, not
Even a passing vehicle, not even a bike, not
So much as a dog was wagging by. Village life,
Sometimes. What happened to everyone?
Give them time. There was a sign, a new sign
Posted just a block away, warning of a bear
In the area. Several newly printed books of poems
Waited on the cabinet under the best, museum window.
Friends and family were out there, somewhere, moving,
Even if they didn’t know it yet, didn’t know yet
Who they were, themselves, changed as we were.
And then there was a banging on the door. People.
As usual. We never saw them coming.

Bigelow Bay, 8 May 2019

Again. The breezes over the lake ruffled
Lines of small waves from the surface, waves
That broke on the pebbles at the edges
Again. The clouds ferried water around,
Gathering it up from the lake in the sun,
Taking the souls of the water to the far shore
Or from the far shore or up toward the sun,
Waves as wings, angels, and similes, then down
Again. The dandelions stood in early yellow,
Weeds that were weedily succeeding again.
A boy followed his older sister over the stones,
With a dog alternately trailing and leading
Again. A swimmer drying in the sun watched
It all while playing with scattered twigs and words
Again, then went and dunked in cold waves
Again. Nothing was ever the same again.

Slocanada, 7 May 2019

The problem with the word bittersweet
Is that it puts the bitter first. A better word
Might find a way to stress a sweet intensity
Hinting at a taste, a tincture of melancholy, 
Not at all bitter, not nostalgic, not sorrowful, 
But with an ache, the weight of difference,
Of memory. There’s such a word. Always
There’s a word for it, if not in this language,
Then spoken somewhere. If a human has felt
A particular experience, another has already
Named it, although maybe now the name
Is lost. Anyway, it’s not the single name
That matters, but all the other words used
To define the name. They tell us whether
This name captures the complicated sense
We wanted to explain, just so, just exactly,
And then gradually we come to use the one
Name as a substitute for the whole packet
We first dragged out to specify how we felt
That time we came around the sharp curve
And saw the beloved lake again, that time
We turned into the densely spindled woods
With the thick moss and the barred light
And the seeping rivulets, that time we felt
All the joy of return, all the rush of other 
Times, because time is always other
And place is just the echo of the other
In the new, a recognition within the ongoing
Change that because something in this is
Unchanged, it must connect us to the gone.

Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, 6 May 2019

Look at it this way. Atmospheric differences
Aside, the sun on the suburbs is the same
As the sun on the lake. The beauty of the light
Lies with the light, bathes in the waves, and if
The suburban parking lots and intersections
Dancing their endless vehicular quadrilles don’t
Wear it well, their amazing suburban lawns sure do,
Emerald as Oz in the spring. All morning we drove,
One among those many vehicles roaring and dancing
Through the mountains, the canyons, the ranch lands
Where the camas was blooming great illusory lakes
Of blue, where the giant yellow scarves of balsamroot
Shawled over sprawling green hills. It’s simple to look at
This world, when it’s only the looking we need to find,
Isn’t it? When there’s nothing but gliding and looking
At the light in transit everywhere, the sort of glorious
Morning when the outer wavering arrives with gifts
For the eyes to bear to the voices of the inner ear, the sights
That sound right, like lambs and llamas in blossoming camas.
And then, by sunset, to be where the nearly tame geese
Are chased by giddy girls out for a walk with their parents
After dinner at the outdoor mall’s small Mexican restaurant,
To be in time for the honks and the shrieks, the oversized roars
Of oversized pick-up trucks and motorcycles on the streets,
The golden sun lavishing all the beige, pseudo-stucco walls
With more of the light that wavered in the lake, that was lost
In the narrow canyons, filtered by the forests, echoed
By the flowers, and worshipped by horses rolling on hills,
That very light, is to be the gnats in the mind of an animal
No longer annoyed by the dancing insect angels of its mind,
Bright in the light, rising, haloing an animal calm in the sun.

Billingsley Creek Lodge, Idaho, 5 May 2019

An American dipper’s diving from a rotten log.
Every atom of every moment contains the same
Plus change, change and also, as well, the same.
We can think of no other functional compromise
This evening, knowing this stream as we do
From many sporadic visits over many years,
The week we kept close, almost ear to the water,
Working out tautological equations, the night
We arrived nearly midnight and tottered by moonlight
To the island to bathe bleary mind in the incessant
Rush of intimately similar loss and replacement.
The early discovery with a late wife. The later visits
With the next. With daughter alone, who delighted
In the frogs as much we delighted in the water.
It can only be that the cosmos, the ongoing, remains
Indivisibly riven in its most infinitesimal phenomena,
Change and same together, always together,
Always dancing at the core. No exchange is ever
Completed, no sameness ever stays, and yet,
This is the same stream as it was all its yesterdays
And changed in every subatomic aspect since
We blinked. Matter is transformation and ghosts
Are what remain, or ghosts are matter liberated
And the transformation alone carries the same
In its endlessly crushing embrace downstream.
And now we’ve lost track of the dipper obsessed
With diving as hungrily as we’ve thought these things.

Outside Ely, Nevada, 4 May 2019

Snow Canyon, Red Mountain, Pine Valley,
Desert Mound, Cathedral Gorge, goodbye
Goodbye, goodbye for now. I’ll see you when
This summer’s old or all the stars have fallen
Out to quarrel like old myths and gods again.
For now, I’ve gone and taken all of us with me.
The continent expands again, and we’re off
For home or whatever’s close around the bend,
Gone, gone around the bend again. We send
Our love to the intersections where we spent
So many fine and unproductive winter hours
Pretending that we were the world’s, the world
Was ours. Goodbye to the seasonal creeks,
The walking, rushing wind that never speaks,
The porcelain blues, the peculiar wet sand smells
From stones that were dunes before the dinosaurs,
Relaxing in the wind and floods to dunes again.
We can’t say we’ll miss you, not at first.
We’re headed back north with a terrible thirst
For the terribly deep, clear lake. The secret
Beating in the strong-keeled breast of every bird
That makes a long and regular migration
Knows that there is only, ever one direction
One happy navigation, away, and the rest,
However cyclical, however long or short
The pendulum, is merely divagation.

Aspen Catkins, 3 May 2019

Although I am broken and have no business
Being in any such place, I like a rugged landscape,
The kind classical Chinese poets might apostrophize,
Where clouds surround my head and touch my face,
And the mountains rise straight from my eyes.
Tonight, without a moon, the stars would be out
Over the high and leafless aspens dangling catkins,
Were it not for clouds and their mountain lightning,
Slightly eerie, noiseless flickering, reminding me
Why humans imagined only supernatural beings
Would be at ease among the peaks.

Ripsong in Utah, 2 May 2019

The cult of the soul,
Oracles in sacred caves,
Things that were new in those days,

Were bound to yield a figure
Such as Epimenides,
Mystical poet,
Magical theist,

Purifier of Athens,
Narrator of origins,
Ancestor of Rip,

Who followed his flock to fall
Asleep fifty-seven years
Dreaming in a cave,
And awoke as a fable.

Zeus, he claimed, was immortal.
Cretans were liars.
Death was not death for the soul,

Although he himself
Wasn’t so eager to go,
Hanging on for another
Hundred years or so.

          —-

For circle-drawing Honi,
The dream was the end,
Not the beginning,
Of wisdom. He slept

Only after questioning
The Psalm of Ascent,
Wondering how the captives
Of Zion in Babylon

Could have dreamed away
Those seventy years
Before they returned,

Only after questioning
The reasoning of a man
Planting a carob
That would not bear fruit

Until after he was dead.
Honi scratched his head.
Then the rocks closed around him

As he stopped by the roadside
For a little nap.
When he woke, seventy years

Had passed, his offspring
Had died before him,
No one believed him

When he said he was himself,
For his own name had become
A by-word for bygone days

When the law was clear,
When he had helped the scholars
Whose descendants mocked him now.

And Honi sang no glad song,
Nor composed new poetry,
Nor drew any more circles
To make the rain fall on him,

But died without companions,
As the Talmud reminds us—
“It’s companionship or death.”

          —-

We’ll pass over the Seven
Sleepers—no one dreams in teams.
Likewise, the three-hundred nine

Years slept by the Companions
Of the Cave, a retelling,
In the terms of a new faith,

Of that old competition
With cruel polytheism
By victorious,
Righteous monotheism,

Except to note what Rip learned,
Later, much, there’s always new
Winners, whether the sleeper

Was said to have known
The winning side in advance
Or to have woken surprised.

Or perhaps that’s the reason
For sleepers plural
In tales of faith triumphant.
A winning side needs a team.

          —-

The solitary Peter
Followed his flock faithfully
As Epimenides had,

And was the first to meet the ghosts
At their silent game,
To drink in the mystery,
And not simply fall asleep.

Faithful Peter the goatherd,
Neither a scoffer,
Like Honi, nor evasive
And shifty as Rip,

Still woke up without his goat.
At least his village
Finally recognized him.

He neither suffered
Nor was enlightened,
Grew neither ancient nor
Was hailed as proof or saint.

Peter went back to Peter,
A villager about whom
A strange tale was told.

Katabasis does not change
All the same. Resurrection
For some of us who were lost
Is just one more resumption.

          —-

The sun is on the mountains.
The storm blows through the desert.
Rain sweeps its curtains

Over the cactus
And irrigated imports
Alike, dragging lightning strikes.

From the safety of our perch
It all feels alright.
We want to see what happens.

While thunder crumples up night,
Images, words, and numbers
Dance in the dark together.

Their hundreds have failed
At interviewing the world
In its own language.

If the world has a language,
We’re at most a turn of phrase.
We are the little bowlers,
Ghosts playing our game.

We’re not sleepers. We’re sailors.
We’re long-ago knights,
Imported from land to land
By every new narration.

We are climbing the canyons
With the storm, with the lightning.
Help us carry up our drink.

We can’t guarantee you’ll stay
Youthful. We can’t guarantee
You’ll have many years left you,

Or any one to love you,
Or anyone who knows you
Or recognizes your name.

We can guarantee you’ll sleep.
The storm will be gone.
Our game will be done. The world
Will have moved on when you wake.

          —-

A moment before he woke,
Epimenides wandered
In his sleep, in his domed cave,

Thinking, how to reascend?
It’s been fifty-seven years.
Will this dreaming never end?

Inverted Taphonomies in Cedar Pocket, Arizona, 1 May 2019

Loss is as close to permanence as the world gets,
The only permanence any aspect of the world attains,
And we are at a loss to say whether a world of change,
A changing world, ever could be any other way.
Yes, loss possesses its own illusions. Yes, lost
Phenomena are sometimes found again, albeit
Never once found the same. But the richest fossil digs,
The careful temple excavations, the closely monitored
Body farms inevitably outline absences, never
To be present again. Briefly here and gone forever
Goes a favorite human axiom, especially beloved
In verse. Consider however, the inverse implications.
If what has been can never be as was again
Then whatever is no longer has thus converted
Brevity into eternity, as only the have been
Can be promised never to be briefly here again.
What hasn’t been might never be, but what has been
Will never be again and therefore will forever have been.