Faint, Familiar Lullabies from the Other Room, Saint George, Utah, 9 October 2018

It isn’t only inaccuracy, nor poetic license
That makes a trust in language dangerous.
A certain atmospheric inaccuracy, in fact,
Is language’s best defense against its own
Weakness, incompleteness. Were words
To itemize precisely only truth and honesty,
Recorded music playing softly in the small
Whorls of a daughter’s dozing ears, lights
Outside the high windows of the little flat
Closed against an early autumn chill
And to mute the sounds of motor traffic,
Nothing much, nothing false, they would be
Still so wholly incomplete as to deceive
Recipient minds quite unintentionally. Only
If they mislead enough to trick those minds,
Just enough, mind you, to cause them
To conjure, each one from its own unique
Store of memories, the atmosphere of this,
Can they complete the circle never true.

None, One, Plural, Utah, 8 October 2018

We never experienced the first. Absence
Of some phenomena we remembered, yes,
And loss of various passing loves precious
To us. But none? Nothing? Nothing cannot
Be experienced. As for the second, it was
Simple enough, the most basic identity,
The single, the singular, the singularity. But
Who among us has ever known such unity?
And unless by one we mean everything ever
Then any one must have a boundary keeping
It from every other thing, and where or when
Does any one such boundary begin? Plural
Only multiplies the agony. To be more than
One requires submission to being one among
Multiples of one kind of thing. There is no one
Kind of thing, no one of any kind, and no
Duplicates of that nonexistent one kind,
Neither. For one thing, then, none is a myth,
And one thing is a myth, for another. As for
Two or more among us, I can only shudder.

The City of Walking Houses, Deserted Utah, 7 October 2018

They shrug their shoulders, self-published,
And wander off into the rocks. Internally,
Their contents have been fixed. Eternally,
However, they are slowly shifting. Marginalia
Along their interior walls are all the additions
These houses ever sprout. Otherwise, they
Only bleach, crumble, and rot. Thousands
Of them can occupy an acre of barren land
With room to spare, milling about in the glare,
But still it’s hard to understand anything is
Going on other than the blazing, empty air.
You don’t have to know what their contents
Mean to know their contents are meaning,
But you have to be stuffed full of meaning
Yourself to even know this as being. Mobile
As artifice itself, they meander into the dust.
The only way to know they’re moving out
There, the nowhere inside you, is to have been
Long ago infected and consumed by trust.

Ancestry Far From Utah, 6 October 2018

It was worth understanding, while stacking
Up the generations of ignoble ancestors
With tobacco stores and branch office careers,
The backwoods preachers, tannery workers,
And petty sellers of immortal plastic things,
The slow tide of privileged white mediocrity
In which I invested neither shame nor pride,
That ritual sustained us, before and behind.
It was possible, all those generations, it may
Be possible yet, to be successfully enduring
While enduringly lacking success. The secret
Lay in conformity, just enough submission
By wallflowers to the demands of the dance.
In England, in New England, among the Seneca,
And in Quebec, none of us accomplished much
Except to leave further careful observants
Of unremarkable rituals to reflect. The way
Of the peasant is orbital, seasonal, full
Of tides, fat moons, perigees and apogees.
Ritual itself, whether feral, rural, or urban is
A kind of orbit, captured and drifting forever
So slowly away or in, for or towards calamity.
We got here because our lineages neither
Escaped the surly bonds of local gravity
Nor did their part to make sense of entropy.
If we convene, we convene to demonstrate
That the cyclical is the closest we can come
To genuine immortality, and that convention
Is the master plan of such periodicity. Again.

Winderland, Utah, 5 October 2018

A world once inhabited and then abandoned
Will always feel smaller on return, and not
Just to children who grew up and came back
As larger-bodied adults. It’s claustrophobic
To re-enter the haunts of memory, especially
If others have since made a more crowded
Home there. The flesh may have contracted
But the soul, that compound being of being
Aware of being, has expanded and no longer
Eases into its old hermit shell. Sometimes
There is nothing more alien than to arrive
Where we started and to know it was never
A start nor a place, and not for the first time.
The stars are remarkably quiet outside.

Infinite Fracture, Saint George, Utah, 4 October 2018

William Carlos Williams, one of the few
Poets to celebrate the burning of a library,
Also suggested composing as fracturing.
What a physician. Those of us more prone
To fracturing unexpectedly feel differently.
He was on to something, though. Whether
Writers strive to orchestrate a unified field
Or a fierce vortex, or an open-ended sprawl,
The universe in which we make our beds
And compose our little rooms proceeds
By infinite fracturing. Hairline cracks appear
And radiate upon examination from every
Seeming solid thing, extending in every one
Of change’s infinite dimensions. The end
Of that continual irruption of discontinuities
Is to lay down the records, fossils, memories
That continually create the past’s novel
Complexities. The flash flood warnings out
Last night were only the latest reminder
That the elaborate stratigraphy of cliffs
In these parts was written, line by line,
By repeated brief convulsions of waste
And destruction. The cosmologists have yet
To know how entropy’s its own worst enemy.

Mostly the Same, Aspen Loop, Utah, 3 October 2018

The lamentable change is from the best.
The worst returns to laughter. I came back
To the aspens in their autumn beauty
More than half a decade later, thinking I was
Leaving then, thinking I was leaving ever
Since, but here I am returning now. And here
They are, still pretending the sound of rain
With every breeze through their remaining
Leaves, these acres and acres of clones
Covering the burnt-over slopes, mostly
The same. This universe, this world, this
Whatever frame you want to name it with,
At least as I have experienced it, is good
At that, at those twins, nothing much
And mostly the same. I do believe it is
Exploring something, exploring itself,
And I am a tiny tendril of it, because it is
So damned thorough about the tiniest
Possible changes, each one turned over
And over again. The universe in a grain
Of sand is scalable to trillions of grains,
To the universe in toto, everywhere different,
Everywhere somewhat the same, each
And every infinitesimal change explored and none
Ignored. This is not the forest I loved and lost
Six years before, not the forest of any earlier
Poems, and yet, in its trunks, if not its leaves,
It is mostly the same. The deception
And madness that pushes us blindly toward
The nearest cliff is also the clever outcast
In us that persuades us the edge is much nearer
So we only take a smaller fall and rise again
To tell ourselves, gossamer, life is a miracle.