Clear Light, Utah, 7 December 2017

You didn’t have to start the day believing
It would go well. You didn’t have to start
Believing anything. You managed to get up.
You managed make a bed, eat breakfast,
Clean up. You were numbered among
The fortunates in having a bed to wake from.
You had not always been so fortunate.
You might not always be so fortunate.
When you stood out on the driveway,
Surrounded by the homes of other humans
And early winter bones of backyard aspens,
You noticed that the clear light felt good
On your shoulders and neck. There was a lot
To be said for being dead, but one thing
There was not: only the returned to living
Could savor any pleasure. So you savored.
You made no mistake about it. You knew
Every little dangerous pain in every joint,
Every bit of wreckage you had to cart
Through your off and on and on awareness,
The moral, mental, biological morass
Of missed connections and bent intentions,
You knew as well as anyone the price
Of living’s dying every day, but you accepted
The pleasure of the cold light warming
Your back, and you said in all fairness,
This is a fine, fine day. You, you dead man,
You said it, how small a claim, and so it was.
Although the world you make each moment
Is too real for your control, you have some
Clear light you can claim within it. So. So. So.

Tabletop Metabolism, Salt Lake City, Utah, 6 December 2017

A homely succulent two hands high
Whose taxonym I didn’t know, glowed
With excess light waves redirecting
From the surfaces of its glossy, waxy leaves.
Nothing could be much less extraordinary
Than an ugly houseplant in an old pot
On a side table cluttered with dead leaves.
But what a machine. There it sat, motionless
To my human eyes, but alive, seething
With photosynthesis, primed for defense
Against parasites, herbivores, dehydration,
And other maladies its ancestors survived.
And what a human thing to have done,
To have excerpted one plant from a system,
To have cultivated, transported, displayed,
And marketed it, to have bought it for cash
And repotted it, to have set it by a window,
A double-paned marvel of industrial design,
To have watered it diligently, to have sat
And stared at it, to have written this about it.
It wasn’t a plant alone or only but an orrery,
A table-top wonder, the tip of the carbon
Pencil inscribing a message about the world
From the world, back to the world no longer
Even attending to its own mail, questioning,
Always questioning the source. It was
That difference between the dancer
And the dance that supposedly could not be
Calculated, the denouement tying it all up,
A damn houseplant in a low sun in a city
At the edge of a poisonous lake left behind
When the great inland ocean that used to be
Here shrank. I imagined my ugly succulent
As a small underwater something floating
In the light of tens of thousands of winters
Gone, just under the surface near the shore.
All the changes demonstrated only changes
Make no actual difference. Ordinary remains
Ordinary—tabletop, wilderness, life, world.

Interstate Exchange, 5 December 2017

I was only local traffic.
I clogged my lane awhile and left.
There had been a few times I’d been
A long-distance trajectory
With no destined destination,
Lonesome liar, midnight rider,
A rambling, gambling backslider,
But god a’mighty cut me down.

Now I went to meet a lawyer,
Then I headed home for dinner.
If you’d asked me about either,
I’d have said I deserved neither.
A man on the exit corner,
Young and bearded, held up a sign,
Begging for help for his hunger.
Curse me, I gave him two dollars.

Auto Shop, Salt Lake, 4 December 2017

A family business on a busy corner, proud
To serve us all “since 1955,” three bays,
Two pumps out front, an office with chairs,
Plastic countertop Christmas tree, no begonia,
It looks cleaner than Elizabeth described it,
Although it still reeks of oil. Maybe someone
Had hurt feelings about her depiction of dirt
And tried to make an effort, scrub it up a bit.
Prints of hot rods on the Bonneville Salt Flats
Decorate most of the available wall. No one
Lives here now, for sure, but a grandson, or
More plausibly a great grandson, bearing
An eye-catching resemblance to the original
Whose ‘50s picture hangs above the register
While sporting the same damn razor haircut,
Rings up customers here to get registered
And inspected, or to get their oil changed,
Or their alternator fixed. These customers,
Their glossy black bricks of smart phones,
Their Escalades, Priuses, and Navigators,
All suggest recent twenty-first century U.S.,
But otherwise this shop is a nostalgia box.
Letting my eyes rummage around in it, I’m
Nostalgic, not for old auto shops or hot rods
Or grease monkeys or razor cuts, all props,
But for that first time I opened her book,
Twentieth century still nearly a quart short,
Or at least a fifth, the condescending poet
Herself already just recently dead, and found
It was possible to mock a little, to look down
A little on the saucy world of greasy men,
To note in a prissy way an ugly grey crochet,
And still to be in love with a scene. I knew
Right away, having come from men like them
Myself, who loved us wasn’t someone hiding
Outside of the poem, as the poet suggested.
It was the poet who softly said so loved us all.

Limbo, Utah, 3 December 2017

For a small while snow flew by outside
And while I watched, I realized how easy
It is for me, now that I’m dead, to cry.
Almost anything can make me tear up,
From the thought of my distanced child
To the sound of wind dying on the windows.
We dead who live are not, are not
The same as those who sleep, are not
The same as those we used to be, are not
The resurrected, are more like refugees.
When the snow stopped falling, it was gone
And there was only moonlight on the lawn.

Television Room, 2 December 2017

The devices all switched off, the sunlight
Through the white blinds was the only show.
How was it change occurred when change
Always subdivided into smaller changes?
From what did anything change that wasn’t
Itself illusion, no more than other changes?
When I looked up the light was different.
Body breathed and struggled to heal. Mind
Circled within the body’s chemistry, waves
Like any waves, shaped by the interactions
Of the properties of the medium they rippled
With the properties of whatever constrained
Them, as patterns in a lake would tell you
Something about water, something about
The cup of stone and earth containing it,
And something about the wind. Likewise,
For mind the properties of synapses, pulses,
Bone, blood, and external events were
Mysteries, visible or invisible, and only
The resultant patterns were easily traced.
Light waves rose and fell from shelves
And carpets, a few carrying information back
Out windows through which they’d entered
To tell the bright December afternoon, yes,
Mind and body hunched in those shadows
Among furnishings and switched-off devices
Thinking hard and circularly about change.

Close to Motionless, Utah, 1 December 2017

Ribs pulled apart by convulsive coughing,
The rest of body ached too much to move
More than minimally. Bed to chair to sofa.
The day was the same for this invalid
As it was for those active—locally sunny,
Mild, another dry day for the almanac. A day.
The world does not, in fact, coordinate.
We wait on coincidences to give us
The synchronicities that give us confidence,
But those coincidences are cons. So the day,
It went one way through the sky but various
Ways through the streets and houses,
Humans, stray cats, rodents, and viruses
Like those bugs building great civilizations
In body’s throat and lungs. Body waited
Impatiently for civilization’s inevitable collapse.
In the meantime everything kept changing,
While very little seemed to move. The world
Does not coordinate, but oh it carves deep grooves.