Revenants at Dawn, House of the Old Year, 31 December 2016

Ghosts of buildings haunted me,
Memories of rooms and paint,
Particular thick railings
On stairs into the basement,
The kinds of window casings,
The lights, the leaks, the cracked bricks,
All exact to me, all gone,

Nothing to revisit but
A handful of photographs
And the distortions inside
The nautilus of my skull:
My father's house, prep-school dorm,
Hospital where I was born.
Ghosts only haunt by absence.

Best Friends, Angel Canyon, Utah, 30 December 2016

Even the bent and busted can, if daring
And sufficiently stupidly reckless,
Grab a mini-odyssey, spontaneous small adventure
From the tight-lipped, iron grip of the edge. Strive,
Seek, not to yield, all that malarkey that somehow
Feels apt. Body pulled self together, or the other
Way around, and with a holiday fifty in the wallet
Drove daughter into the canyons for a lark. Wove
Through flashing shadows, sun on snow, ice
Running with water, road ribbon running
With tourists taking vacation pictures of each other
Against the envy-inducing backdrops of great beauty,
Crowding like sheep with cameras to get pics of bighorn sheep
Browsing near Checkerboard Mesa, one horned kid dashing
Spryly through the flock of people like an angel unawares,
One young woman clutching a tablet and literally dancing
With glee to be pictured with the real sheep. Nature. Miracle.
Bro-dude sledders wading hip-deep upslope to toboggan
Down Checkerboard Mesa itself. Giant tour bus disgorging
Hordes at the Thunderbird diner on the east turn-off.
Just us and a few pick-ups heading past Coral Pink Dunes
To Kanab, daughter demanding a chance to play the iPad,
Father demanding daughter help watch for deer and learn
To savor and absorb the view. Not everywhere has mountains.
Why? Where did their mountains go? We reached the sanctuary,
Said hello to a receptionist and a rescued fat lizard being taken
Out for some sun and a walk, then drove to the Bunny House
For our tour of the hutches, the lion-headed, the flop-eared,
The pink-eyed, the sable-furred, the friendly and the frightened.
One other family arrived for the tour, serendipitously including
A girl near my daughter's age, ready to play. A snowball fight,
A snow man, some climbing of ancient junipers while we waited,
Parents talking quietly, half-watching the new best friends,
Half happy to ignore them. Then into the rabbit warren
With the earnest young women who volunteered, the ones
Content to change alfalfa, clip rabbit nails, clean rabbit soil.
Save them all. The rabbits were rabbits, clearly sleek and well-fed.
The girls cooed over them, the floppy-eared and the two new
Rescues that were in a cage "bonding" the best. Before long,
The girls had bounded back outside and were running wild.
End of tour. Parental goodbyes, compliments to each child.
One last whim back at the entrance, a sudden turn to Arizona
Instead of back through Zion and home. Not yet. A stop
In the desert, at the sign by the side of the road for auto,
Beer, guns, and ammo. The last of the holiday fifty for gas,
Snacks, and a lottery ticket. O defiance! O hope, divine delusion!
Returning only then, the world visited, the world spited,
The world, or one small corner, navigated, composed
Now and composing this sort-of poem in the head, in the light,
The daughter in back defeating the bad wolf and the wicked witch.
The road rising and falling gently home, in good repair.
When it's almost all gone for good, but still enough,
Especially when it's almost all gone but still, for a little while
More, enough, it's enough. It's wonderful. It's enough.

A Bed and a Window, Winderland, 29 December 2016

The light in the invalid window was all the reason
An invalid needed to feel good about the day, about the days
In bed, quintessential nest of selfishness and sacrifice alike.
What's sadder, happier, sappier than being bed-ridden?
No place lonelier or more intimately social, no place more
Removed from or central to rotating casts of peopled planets.
This window faced the winter sun as squarely as the days
Allowed, low and straight south. Hanging plants basked
While just outside, the bare-twigged bushes glowed with snowmelt,
Rustled with hungry finches and sparrows. This
Could not last. All victories are pyrrhic, and before dawn
The heart could pound the invalid awake with fear
That the wind was up, the power had been shut off, that it was
Already the day of days, the one that would enter the ice.
Yesterday, after just such a predawn fright, after sun returned
And the heart had calmed for another hour, the invalid's daughter,
Back from a walk, fresh-faced from the cold, noticed, delighted,
The delicate imprint, the exquisite silhouette of feathers outspread
That had been left by the powdered wings of a bird
Who had hit the window in full flight, leaving behind a dusty angel.
Just so, but today the window spilling sun again, the warm bed,
And the reading of old poems praising the light in still life.

Gambler's Gethesame, Dark Water, Utah, 28 December 2016

"Reader, do you think it is a terrible thing to hope
When there really is no reason to hope at all?"
The universe and I have never seen eye to eye, never
Quite been able to coordinate successfully. I
Can't seem to take the universe sufficiently
Seriously, and the universe can't seem to take
Any notice of me. It's not that we've been hung up
On impossibilities. Except for a different universe,
I've never wanted for anything the universe couldn't deliver
Me. It's my insane craving for the ordinary-but-
Unlikely-to-happen-to-me, all my vacationing
At the risk of belief, my insistence on dreaming the fortuitous
Improbability, the extremely statistically insignificant
That's always there, somewhere, but can't ever seem to align
With me. I'm well aware it probably won't and doesn't have to,
But it could. It could and it hasn't and it haunts me. Maddening
Improbability tempts me to defy it in all its indifferent glory.
As for other people's magicking, other people's bargains
And bromides and tight bonds with their ancestors,
Their common sense and deities, if an uncommon
God really wants me so badly, he can't just let me
Hang myself. He has to come and get me.

Good Night, Mrs. Nast, and Thanks, Wherever You Are, 27 December 2016

The hooks of shame can find no purchase in this lad with the trick shoes.
The Slavic stewardess, survivor of a 33,000 foot fall, dies. The after life
Of the afterlife amounts to forty-four years. The life before
The after life is everything and forever and is nothing much
Fretting about being never. Advice for the dying: ignore
Advice from the dying. Or for the dying. None of it comes from anyone
With any prior experience of being dead. Yes, smiles the world,
I'm beautiful. I'm exquisite. Look at me all you want, but what
Do you think you're going to do? There is no morally
Superior place in this world. There is no superior place
In this world. There is no place. And I say to myself,
What a wonderful world. Wish I had less to say. I shall.
But you know the corollary. Or you would, but you're gone.
You're right: we were wrong. This is not the world. The world's past the fall.

Cryptographer's Lullaby, Voynich Lane, Utah, Boxing Day 2016

Nobody was more massive, more pointless,
More less read, more more less, than was my balneology.
Behold! Herbarium, towering lingam, cornstalk of the Pueblo,
Idiot graphic of rock art's indeterminacy, song

Of the male of a little species grown, momentarily,
Great, greater than the cedars and the cetaceans.
Are we done? I want to curl up my ego like a bedroll
And hide in a natural alcove like a Peruvian sacrifice

Or a bog victim for a thousand and a thousand years.
There's an insert, a tip-in in the folio of the master,
The mistress, the one who created the complete, compacted
Facsimile of a poem, a hymn, a book of prayer in the unknown.

I have finished the song I inherited from others than
My parentage. Here I am. Gone. Oh, if only, if only.

Noesis Noeseos Noesis Noel, Winderland, 25 December 2016

Imagination's the world's wickedest invention.
A late acquaintance once put it this way:
It's not that I want to die. I absolutely do not
Want to die. But if I have to die, and I do,
And if I have to know I have to die, and I do,
Then I wish I were already dead. Now she was,
That long, long-lost acquaintance, therefore no more,
Therefore no longer having to imagine it, as she had,
And there I was, counting the years one way
And the days the other, reading about a long-dead
Philosopher's elaborate, immobile god, chief
Of a celestial hierarchy of divine lights and spheres,
Capable only of thinking about thinking about thinking,
The unmoved mover. The unmoved mover was the object of all desire.
It moved without moving itself because others craved it
And so moved constantly toward it. Hunger
Was only love of the unmoved mover. But
Was that unmoved mover therefore everything or nothing,
Death or more dying? For what does anything hunger? Repetition?
Life at least asked no such questions before imagination
Started looking for stories and signs in the stars.
Why did the astrologers head to Bethlehem, storywise?
To keep moving. Keep moving, blues falling down like hail.
Gold, frankincense, and myrrh, tokens for a later age to imagine,
Maintenance, repair, supplies, all means to moving
To something that remains unmoved with respect to its hunger
To keep moving. Today was the biggest holiday of the year,
At least it used to be when I was my parents' child,
And I asked myself, how many of these exact days
Of this exact holiday do you, body, remember? How many
Will the daughter for whom we performed this day,
Believing in what we could not see or feel? Do we have to?