Low Visibility, Kolob Terrace, Utah, 7 March 2019

The flash-flood warnings were rolling in,
Along with the roiling creeks, liquid mud.
Dense fog descended at noon. Extrinsic
Mortality due to inclement weather became,
Once again, possibility. A few days earlier,
Tornadoes had obliterated a town in Alabama.
Montana had set a March record, minus 40.
Whenever weather dominates local news,
Whenever everyone starts comparing notes
Of their own alarming encounters—“my son
Woke me up to tell me he could hear the creek.
I sent him back to bed. I told him, it’s not when
You hear the creek you have to worry, yet.
It’s when you can smell it”—thoughts turn
To my own mother, whose dirt-poor farming
Childhood in New England in the Depression,
A childhood of hand-pumped water, outhouses,
Wood stoves, ice and snow storms, maybe
Played a part in her late-life obsession with weather
On cable TV. She could sit for hours, glued
To updates on hurricanes, tornadoes, killer
Heat waves, even displays of any records set,
But especially floods and blizzards. Her children
And her grandchildren sometimes joked about it.
I did. Weather destroys nowhere near as many
Lives as guns, guns nowhere near as many
As infections, infections now lagging cancer.
My mother herself died of general collapse
And senescence, indoors in fine summer weather,
By then oblivious to any news, even of storms.
But people will perish of weather by nightfall,
Somewhere, by nightfall every night and again
Before morning. I’ve lived long enough now
To have known neighbors who later froze
To death or vanished under a rock slide. Hikers
And campers die here in Zion every year.
Another warning to stay out of flood-prone
Areas then lit up my phone, cell service alerts
Reaching out through the foggiest high country.
I grinned and remained on the side of the road.

Feoffment with Livery of Seisin, Snow Canyon, Utah, 6 March 2019

I snap a twig from the dry tree next to me.

In a few days it will be spring, which means

So many things. I dig down in the soft sand

Of the damp wash and bury the twig, along

With a coin. I pronounce the magic words,

Invoke the magic name of my mythical king.

Now and forever, for all my heirs, I own this

Land. No one else knows this, but it’s true.

I own the dark green scrub, the broken stone.

I own the sky now polishing its clouds. I own

This basalt outcrop, this cottonwood, this

Poem. Because I am not the poet, am not any

One of the creatures that pass through here,

Not even the land, which can never be mapped

By me exactly, anyway. I am the name that I am,

And I own, the moment I name. Spring. I am.

LaVerkin, Utah, 5 March 2019

Three white women, permed white heads
Like dandelion cotton, carry on a conversation
Over lunch in a corner of the Stagecoach Grille.
After an initial discussion of the hazards
Of dying, which all three agree are worse
Than death, they switch topics, declaring
The shortcomings of the young. One woman
Seems particularly exercised about education,
Especially foreign-language immersion programs
For elementary schoolchildren. She starts in
On a complaint about her grandson indulging
In this pernicious fashion for his own kids,
Illustrating their foolishness with complaints
Against the arrogance of his chidren’s teachers
In Mandarin immersion classes. “Chinese!
Can you believe it? Chinese! They’re too young
For that. Let them learn their own thing, first,
Then later they can take another language
If that’s what they want, in high school. And now
They’ve got all these Spanish schools. You know why?
They want to make our kids learn Spanish
Because they refuse to learn English, all these
Hispanics coming into white neighborhoods.”
She goes on for a bit like that, with general agreement
That even if it’s right to feel sorry for “the Hispanics,”
“We should be helping them in their own countries,
Not letting them pour into ours.” Somehow,
This gets the three onto the topic of all the guns
Being purchased by another woman’s grandson.
She understands he needs to keep himself safe,
The way things are, but he’s wasting his money
Buying so many more guns than he needs. “I tell him,
You better not tell anyone you have all those guns,
And you better lock them all up in a safe, or someone
Will be coming for them, and maybe for you, too.”
Three heads bob assent. Something’s always coming.

Sun in the Clouds over Zion, 4 March 2019

In the world of the signaling, singing, weeping apes,
There’s always another binary debate. Today,
As handsome flotillas of clouds flared their sails
In the sun, swanning along the afternoon between
Rains that just were and the rains yet to come,
One could root out from bookstores, screens,
And magazines an either/or fallacy about progress
And the apocalypse. We are, to be sure, accelerating
And our acceleration keeps accelerating by jerks,
As our numbers grow and our nurdles pile up,
As our depredations intensify and our artifice
Talks to itself. What does this mean? Where
Will we go? When we will go and be gone?
One camp specializes in focusing on disasters,
Although oddly almost always picking only one
To identify as The One: the bomb, the climate,
The trash, the robots, the population, the plague,
The genetic engineering, the coming famine.
The other camp combs through the past
And comes up with graphs, graphs on graphs,
Showing the good numbers climbing, the bad
Items—violence, disease, starvation, crime—
In erratic but mostly continuous decline.
Humans. We want to think we’ll all be gone
Tomorrow, or else we’ll thrive and rocket around.
Don’t we ever face the feeling we’ll sink only
Slowly, slowly, like rain on already wet ground?

Thunderstorm in the Parking Lot, Saint George, Utah, 3 March 2019

The past, the future, and the invisible danced
Like happy angels on the ranked windshields
Of the parked trucks and cars. Cloud-to-cloud
Lightning brightly underlined the darkening
Of the lowering afternoon sky. “Time to die,”
Said one particularly batty angel to a demon
Gasping next to him. But the rest pranced,
Content to exchange sky for glass and steel,
For a change. Change keeps things happening,
Living or barely moving, angels, birds, ghosts,
Lightning in the mountains or the mountains,
Dying or coming to life. “At last! I am alive!”
Gasped another angel, splat. The invisible,
The future, and the past. Splish, splash, splat.

Divination Near the End of Winter, 2 March 2019

Listen to the lack of messages. Let the lack
Wash over you. Ourselves aside, this seems
Like anything but an ominous cosmos.
The distant rhythm of a raven’s throat,
Which would be obnoxious were it up close,
And the much more distant fading rumble
Of a passenger jet, which would be a scream
On approach, both drop away into nothing.
Neither one was saying anything. Divination,
True divination, surrenders planned futures
To all the meaningless sounds in passing
And understands the best prediction is change,
Change, message-less change, more and more
Of the same saying nothing and never the same.

No Additional Text, 1 March, 2019

The smell of snowmelt soaking the sandstone
Mud flats in the sun. The doe brushing her back
Against the juniper as another doe watches her
Without comment. The glance at the cracked face
Of the cliff, the smooth face of the watch. The clutch
In the gut that all this was yesterday, alone, calm,
And now it’s time to put it out of mind, to teach
About collective knowledge and the transition
To state societies, to answer rafts of questions
For a class packed into a room of painted bricks.
Maybe I don’t want the world to speak
To me, anymore. Its speechlessness sounds
Sweeter now. It's silence I’ve come to listen for.