A White Horse, 7 November 2017

I kept refusing
Opportunities to die.
Good opportunities, too,
Excellent chances.

The bright new penny
Landed face up in the mud.
So did the smooth worn quarter,
Then the dull nickel.

Three times I had asked
Should I come down the mountain?
Should I try another day?

The odds of three heads
The same as three straight
Pregnancies inheriting
A dominant mutation,

Long enough to seem a sign
But not nearly long enough
To be sure of it.

Better to lie here and die
Or live one more day and lie?
A hawk was watching,

As was a white horse.
Conquest? Pestilence?
I went back down the mountain.

Next day, there I was,
Nothing resolved or conquered,
My own mind a pestilence.

But I did greet a sweet dawn
And moonlight as white as that horse.
I got to hug my daughter.

The Reservoir Drained, 6 November 2017

Fifty five trips around the sun held more
Stories than the most gifted storyteller
Could tell, and I was among the least.
Leave no trace, no shallow graves, so go
The slogans of the wilderness visitors,
But none of them really wished to leave
Without a trace. We liked to think we could,
With concentration, make the world
A better place, the way the sea foam wishes
It could leave behind a better wave.
We dreamed we left none but a noble trace.
In any case, I was bound to leave some lines
Behind but hardly any of the kind most of us
Hope to leave or find. And why would I wish
That everyone after me knew I was here
If I’m bound to not know I was here myself?
I remember my lost daughters, lost wife,
Lost parents, siblings, other relatives,
And casually lost acquaintances. They don’t.
They don’t remember me or themselves.
As soon as I’m gone or forget, there will be
No one left to recall the exact appearance
Of my one found daughter’s head crowning
Between her mother’s pinhooked knees.
I know it looked like many other such births,
Like millions, like billions of others. But like
Was never is, is never is, is never the same.
After hours of pushing, her soft skull still
Emerged as a sphere, a theater in the round.
Her eyes were open when I first saw them,
Blue and unfocused, unfinished and being
For the first time something human to see.
I remember so many, many things. Wrong,
Dead wrong, if you say I can’t take them with me.

Ghel Dheu, 5 November 2017

Hope more improbable than magic dogged
Me around, panting as insistently as its buddy
The blues. I rejected the presumption
That we fail when we fail to connect.
If you lie to escape a lie meant to contain you
And destroy you, in what way, tell me, exactly,
Did you, did you die? You can’t not be what
You knew never was at all. The handwriting
Was lying when it sketched across the wall.
Impermanence brings the permanent end.
Everything else is living in ignorance; everything
Is living and ignorance. Nothing is knowing.
Glamorous moon, the name of a ghost,
The hunter high past mid-autumn sky.
Shine little glow worm, glimmer glamour.
I wanted the uncut drug, the overdose
Of the improbable. Why? Because if it comes
To you, statistically pure, the improbable
Validates you, tells you that you had meaning,
The rest of the compulsively lying world be damned.
Thus the dying think to themselves, this may be
The last time I touch this person, see this scene,
But they are wrong, headed as they are
For no time, for never was at all. It’s the longer
Living who will search their memories and say
That, that was the last time we touched the dead.

Lava Point, 4 November 2017

Up at lava pond, a black beaver scampered
And a white horse cantered free of fences.
A woman with heavy dark hair stood there.
Her name is Samsara and sooner or later
She’s going to fix your little red wagon, she is.
Sooner or later, she’s going to settle your hash.
One day when I was seventeen and it was
Spring, blossoms and new mown grass, etc.
In the air, my future as bright as it ever cared
To get, she herself started in on me. I stared
Out of my dormitory window at the green,
And I put my God in a box because I wanted
To love her. I asked Him to do something
For me, which was to speak to me, to answer,
Anything He wanted to say, just so I knew it.
But nothing outside my own head was said.
I tried again, occasionally, and not with God
Or gods only. Here and there, I offered a dare,
An opportunity for something, anything
Supernatural, superhuman, or in any event
Nonhuman, to engage in conversation with me.
You will say I was obtuse and stubborn. I was
And I was, but I was hardly alone in offering
Prayers, making requests, or looking for signs
And omens in coincidences or the heavens.
It’s as human as talking to beg favor of the world,
Which was, in the end, what I came to: pure
Propositions put to the world as a whole,
The planet, the cosmos, the universe, the whole,
Assuming there was a whole and that it knew
Itself as such or some part of it knew and could
Answer for or even if not the rest. Whatever.
Still, the odd things dominated and the hope
For structured responses dimmed. Latterly,
I’d come to be numb enough to ask only
That the numbers, the nonmiraculous odds
Of those meaningless fairies, the numbers
Agree with me when I most desperately
Needed them to agree. That would be
Miracle enough for me. By way of response
I got my own dreams served to me in my head
On a platter, garnished with irrelevant surprises,
A pretty day at altitude in November, a black
Beaver waddling into the rushes, slap of tail
And then gone, a marvelously solitary,
Unsaddled, unbridled white mare in the fields
Of dry grass beside that beaver pond, crossing
The road behind me, then accelerating
Into a trot that looked like a break for freedom
Over the broken fences into the aspens.
Yes, it was all lovely but it was not symbolic,
Not predictive. It answered no prayers,
And still I can see her standing there, face
Hidden in her extravagant dark hair.

Cold Water, Utah, 3 November 2017

All Death’s birthdays passed me by, and then
It was just November. The canyons were still
Gold by the creeks and unseasonably warm
But toothed with shadows all day long, while
Up high, in the aspen plateaus and small ponds,
All was bony white and properly cold but bright.
The rowboat with two men talking and fishing
Felt like a haunting from earlier autumn, as if
The same boat, same men from weeks ago,
Years ago, decades ago, were an apparition
Doomed to float around the lake in all seasons.
I looked longingly at the cold water. To swim,
Even convulsed with shudders, is better
Than to fall. To lie down in minuscule wavelets
Like the scales of a slumbering monster of ice,
To lie down like an incision in the water’s side
And float like sutures on the surface, allowing
The wounded water to slowly close over
And heal—but not while that damn fishing boat
Floats by—that would be better than dying
In the usual hospital bed or accident.
I had heard that it takes a long time to cool
The blood of a pulsing mammal, a long time
To get safely past that mad moment
Of hallucination and leaping about, stripping
To skin. But time is not a quantity to be measured,
Only a measure of what’s lost. I love how cold
Water reflects the least bit of light and shines.

Out of Pocket, Arizona, Dia de los Muertos 2017

I came to the door of disaster like a dog
Looking for a home. Don’t drive me away,
Oh kind one. Don’t refuse me a master.
But I’ve been hanging around the perimeter
Of the apocalypse ever since, never let in,
Begging for scraps of catastrophe, which I get,
I always get. Oh, to be inside the door. Oh,
To not be anymore. Oh to be fed on the bread
Of pure corporeality, of things unaware,
The being of unliving, the breath of the dead.
But not to have to go there, not to cross
The threshold first. That’s a truth about some
Dogs—we whimper at the door, but we are
Too afraid to accept the invitation in.

Desperately Seeking Bony Lady, 1 November 2017

An unfathomable ocean of atoms separated
His gaze from the nearest glowing peak
At sunset. What chance had he to sway that sea?
He remained very much the study of a man
Who’d left the world of getting and spending
But never fully joined the forest of fairy tales.
The music of the north, the forever north,
Visited him. “Our lady of the holy death, come
For me, comfort me, provide for my survivors
And sole descendant. There are cedars
And their cousins in the canyons that belong
To no one. I mean to become an end among them.
Watch over my bones and bring them home.
I surrender them in the hope of fortune
For the soul that was more than me, other
Than me, the souls of those surviving me.”
He thought, in the lamplit moonlight, I’m not
Praying rightly. The forest remains too thin.
I want the cedars giant, young, and closing in,
On the coppery canyon walls another sunset.