Poplars, Cottonwoods, and Palms in Immortality, Arizona, 14 December 2017

They’re out there, swaying in the wind
Beside the braided silver of the Virgin River,
Which means only that they were in my head
At some point during my enduring living,
Like Stevens’ windy citherns were in his,
Once, reduced to one on the edge of space
Near the end of him. Mine stand at the edge
Of nothing, really, maybe time, but so stands
Everything always

                         At the cutting edge of change,
Always change, itself everything on the edge
Of nothing. The cottonwoods there are gold
Into mid-December, when holiday greetings
Get exchanged by golfers under talkative palms.
The poplars shelter small birds that burst out
And dart back in again, cheeping and competing,
All year. If you walked in from the river banks,
Through the gold cottonwoods, over the greens,
Down the avenue of poplars and under the palms,
You could duck into a dark room of tourist kitsch
With a long, polished cherrywood bar
On the left and golf clubs to rent on the right.
In the center, at the back, you could find
The closest human approach to the meaning
Or at least the true sense of the universe
At a glass counter where you could pay to play
Numbers carefully constrained and random.
Someday, somewhere somebody will win,
But until then we we're all equally likely to lose,
While the wind moves briskly in the branches.

Poem Right Out of the Box, 13 December 2017

The outer world trembled and the inner
World delighted. The words without the tune
Had never any feathers, but they sang, too,
And were the makers of the song they sang,
And of the little bird, and of the strangest,
Tragic-gestured sea, and of the chilly she
Who seemed to be the owner of their voice.
Understand, the next began not with tunes
But with the naming of the expectation
That any tune was a pattern that could
Continue, spero, sparrow. Naming names
First called the tune containing all tomorrow.
Then the outer world trembled and the words
Therefore declared their independence, or
If not independence (as they still needed
You and needed me, even being themselves
You and being themselves me), their potency
Over the nature of things, all unnamed things
Not actually existing, after all, not yet as things.
The outer world trembled when Jack jumped
Out of the box and said, you may believe
In a future because you can speak, because
Speech gave you belief and belief depended
On a confidence that something would always be
Happening. Did I startle you? Only because
I, language, existed to prepare you, to shape
You, to warn you something must come true,
Something new. Only because you knew.

Inversion Fog, 12 December 2017

Memories are terrifying, the lonely ones

Especially. In the movies, when one begins

To remember, often as not the ominous 

Music comes on, as it should. Memories

Can never be trusted or shared, but we fade

To nothing without them. They’re the angels

We all talk about, trumpeters and fallen,

Spirits athwart our paths in the night,

Messengers telling us who we should serve,

What we’ve done wrong, what will become

Of us, of the world beyond us, who we are.

They wrestle us, disable us, rename us.

They descend invisibly to stand on pins.

They cling like rimes of frost to every twig.

I stood in the thick, milky swirl of an ice fog

Tonight, one that draped the spindly trees

And carpeted a half-empty parking lot

Outside the emptier cinema of ghostly lights, 

Blurring reds and oranges through white

Haze, and I recalled similar solitary winter

Inversions fifteen, twenty, thirty years ago,

Each one an unhealthy haunting I half-liked,

In Salt Lake and Missoula and elsewhere,

In these bowl-shaped valleys where cold air,

Wood smoke, car exhaust, and recollections

Collect and settle. Jeder Erinnerung ist shrecklich.

Holiday Lights, Salt Lake City, 11 December 2017

Top blinds open a crack, at dawn two lights
Along the gutter, one orange, one blue,
Could be seen still glowing in the cold haze.
An unfair approximation of a man lay in bed
And blinked at the apparition. It was too late
To lead another life, but then it always was,
Even at the moment of birth. So this was it,
The being that was the sum total of being.
There was a time when traveling circuses
Would bring to small towns a sideshow tent
That featured something amazing, electric
Lights. Rubes would enter the darkened tent
And gasp in awe when the day turned on.
It wasn’t long, of course, before all that was done,
Once every farmhouse kitchen and bath
Had a little sun. Then more light and more.
The bulbs themselves are changing now.
We adapted to our inventions. Our inventions
Adapted themselves. One morning we will
Wake up and say, this is the only life there is,
This is the only life we know, under our endless
Haze, embraced in our permanent glow.

Necessary, Utah, 10 December 2017

If there were a necessary truth in any story
Directed by David Lynch, it had to have been
The inevitable humming of machines. And you,
If you sat in the quietest luxury hotel room,
You’d have heard, if you cared, a constant hum.
Hospitals and airplane cabins went without saying.
So did cities, suburbs, the insides of automobiles,
The railroad intersections clicking at night,
The vast grain silos humming on the plains.
But even in what remained as designated
Wilderness (meaning it was not wilderness),
If you’d slept out under the stars as often
As I’d done, you should have noticed the hum
Of the jets that almost never abandon the sky.
As a guest in a modest house in the foothills
Of a sternly massive mountain range, I heard
The hum of local machines incessantly, I listened,
From dawn to the next dawn, to the refrigerator
And the furnace coming on, the faint thrum
Of all the wiring, the plumbing, the passing
Cars and trucks outside, the freight trains
Mourning through the unseen canyons beyond.
I was not bothered, not so bothered as some.
The machines as they functioned reminded me
What a fine-tooled work of art humanity had become,
What an ornament Earth had bodied forth
From her continually spinning, slowly slowing,
Ever faintly humming dynamo of lives.
If there were a necessary truth in any story
It would had to have been something hummed.

Welcome, Stranger, 9 December 2017

There were waves that were things or waves
That only were in things, and I found more
Mystery in the latter. A sheet of light,
A radiating shimmer from a source was weird
In the earlier sense, spooky and powerful,
But the wave that had no existence except
As a passing distortion, a compression
And an expansion of the relationships
Among phenomena that were never waves,
Moved beyond weirdness, however normal
The experience of it was—old mossy pond
Splash, the pulse of your slow whisper
In my sobbing ear, the rustling of papers
In a room empty of souls, the contraction
And expansion of the local space-time curve
By an event so great and so ancient
A million million worlds as detailed as ours,
Every last life since the dawn of life included,
Every event, every dimension, every memory
A million million times collapsed—to stranger.

Fifteenth and Fifteenth, 8 December 2017

Daughter turned a year of weeks on Friday,
A year of Mondays, Tuesdays, Sundays.
Three hundred and sixty five Saturdays
All in what was only an opening act of a life.
Oh, god, you had no idea when you created
This world that would have to create you
You were involving yourself in quantifiable
Longing and loneliness, or did you? Count
The days a human wakes to being human
And consider how divinity had to wait
On a few tens of thousands of years, a few
Hundreds at least of generations to be born.
Body sat down at a cafe in Salt Lake City
A month to the day after failing at dying
And thought, here we are, us and our ideas
Of how this universe works or should maybe
And somewhere a child of ours is figuring
What best to ask for a seventh birthday gift.