Kassidy Keeps Her Cards in Order, St. George, Utah, 7 October 2016

I had a student in my office who disliked how I shuffle things,
Books and music, quotations, disciplines, bad ideas.
Where I prefer a tarot deck, she prefers a stack of slides
Ready for presentation: (1) Free fall is the natural, unforced state
Of motion. (2) It was all a swoon, from first gasp to last,
A lovely swan dive into life, a pool sometimes empty,
Sometimes full. (3) The self was the story I told,
The story that told itself it was a story that could tell itself.
(4) Coherence could not be confused with sitting still,
Not even when seated and listening to a student
Berate the traffic as it tumbled by outside. Therefore,
She concluded, the fall is not itself falling, falling is self.
I shuffled her tautology, escape made loose I looped.

Last Rounder Song, Virgin, Utah, 6 October 2016

The cows hid but made their presence known on the breeze.
The tourists drove, paused, drove along the road above,
And the cows ignored them. The hawks hunted or waited,
And the ravens patrolled the road for recent extinctions.
The rounder sat under a cotton tree, listening to recordings
Singing rounds and counting down the vague remaining days
Until the end of time for him began another round for those
With better ways. Who laid time in the shade and gave her
Every dime he made, did all he did, said all he had to say;
Who couldn't make a living in this way, couldn't rock the cradle,
Couldn't sing the song, couldn't hang around and still be gone.

Hawk Scream, Harrisburg, Utah, 5 October 2016

I listened to the radio, the BBC, bouncing via satellite
From a booth or a disk, a planet's half turn ahead of me,
Windows open, tumbledown sandstone and yellowing cottonwoods
In front of me, as they interviewed the terminal and the elderly,
Keen to know, for them to tell us, how they most wished they had been.
Why do we strive to compile the regrets of the dying?
What do we possibly think we're preventing?
Why is it unbearably melancholy to imagine
This wide world is as it evidences itself to be,
Everything really everything, nothing really nothing,
No plan, no mistakes, no alternative to this cosmos
That happens to be, infinitely subdivided indefinitely,
Containing the desire and the math to explain itself
And predict itself probably, but never beyond what was,
Never was? Meaning: given meaning, what could it mean
It never meant anything more than that hawk's scream?

Shadow of West Temple, Zion, 4 October 2016

I stood in our moonless courtyard before dawn, swaying sleepily,
Looking at the nonsense splatter of stars, doing the human thing
Myself, throwing meaning. Perhaps they face a common enemy,
The dragon and the hunter, the serpent, tail draped over the vault's arch
From the north, the square-shouldered knight in the south,
The monster and the trickster, the treasure lurking in its mountain lair,
The storm god hurling lightning from the sky, the animal, the cultural,
And that's what we always got wrong. The hunter pulls his bow and aims
Near the same spot toward which the serpent aims its open jaws.
What are they attacking? Defending? What alarms them, fierce creatures?
Something that couldn't be glimpsed from my perspective, me, little person
Who can casually talk of dragging loves with him to witness his disaster.
It is disaster, whatever it is, disaster hidden behind the great scalloped wall
Of West Temple, blackest in starlight, in the dark beyond, forever west.
Just taste the word, once-glittering star crunched like glass in the mouth.
Negative star, non-star, not out there, disaster. That's what Orion's aiming at.
That's why Draco recoils and opens his fanged mouth light years. We've been
Fooling ourselves, lying to ourselves that they're up there
Fighting each other, those poor, scattered sparks flaring up
Briefly, when all's said and done, before their common enemy,
Storied altar of stories, of sacrifice, all-swallowing dark.

Watching the Clouds Shrug Farewell, Emptiness, Utah, 3 October 2016

Darkness, ecstasy, anxiety, terror, hope,
Hope beyond hope, component of the foolishness fueled all the rest.
Rest. Let the acronym for the decision least likely to be your own rest.
Why would anyone run down the hill, the gentle slope I rolled down
With the full knowledge of what momentum meant
And a beautiful view of the clarity with which the meadow grass
Terminated in a line of clear blue empty sky? I didn't think
I would soar into that sky, after all, nor hang suspended.
Something in me loathed the edge but loved rolling
In the grass and the flowers, faster and faster, wanted the drop
To be over. Too bad I risked entangling loved humans with me.
Lying in the grass, face ever so briefly returned to the air,
I thought what turn was the no return and realized
I would have had to shed myself to save myself from myself,
As at every opportunity to embrace this native soil
Of soft, accelerating surrender to accept, I accepted.
Aching ribs and all, I rolled over again, feeling grounded,
Supported by the whole mass of the earth a moment longer,
Although I felt the gap to open under me, last emotion, as well.

Apraxia Near Empty Amphitheater Stage, Zion, 2 October 2016

Knowledge without demonstration was all the skill I ever knew,
All sorts of monsters in my nature less possible than chimeras or centaurs.
The hills were shadows and they flowed. The story, as ever, remained
In charge. The rebels charged, words who had escaped the tales made them.
Again, our petty scoundrels came to the crumbling lip of the precipice.
They could tell you all about the sort of narrative could rescue them,
But they were only free words, doomed words, and they could not
Actually narrate the ingenious rope with which they could escape
The monsters, down the hills, evading the noose with which they hanged
Themselves at the end of the perilous descent, leaving me
To be the phenomenon that called itself a self, words words, tales tales,
And the cliffs beckoning from all sides forgiveness, or better yet, mercy.

Euergetism, West Temple, Zion, 1 October 2016

She might have been dispatched by ghosts to announce their munificence.

She brooded over the West Temple, then the neighborhood 

Of the Anasazi Plateau. She rumbled a little and advanced

Her dove-grey, thickly feathered breast over town and the Watchman,

Threw me one sharp glance, then retreated again into white towers.

I knew what her graciousness and grumbling indicated. A new month

On the Roman calendar, possibly the last, and it was a gift

That I should still be witnessing these acts of the past 

Raising fresh monuments of fine skies, a gift praising itself

For using its own resources to keep me in good weather 

A little while longer who should have been long gone by now.

Last night, a light that could have been a low-flying, leisurely meteor

Or an isolated sidearm twirl of ball lightning, blue, fell over my shoulder

Out of a quietly starlit sky. Today, my daughter went to the library.

Tomorrow or tomorrow, whenever tomorrow's good and yesterday, 

The inscriptions of the storm that were never pronounced today

Will be read from the rocks that themselves can have no memories,

Neither for the good nor for the calamity a calm commands.