Fireworks, Salt Lake City, New Year’s Eve 2017

They set them off early, first a few individuals
Scattered around residential neighborhoods,
And then a proper display just before ten.
Or they set them off late, as by early afternoon
Online, one could read the reports and see
The clips and pics of completed celebrations
In Polynesia, Hong Kong, Auckland, Sydney.
Who knew what time it really was anywhere?
We didn’t do fireworks for New Year’s Eve
In the neighborhood where I grew up,
And my evangelical family preferred
Watch Night services at our cinderblock church
To New Year’s Rocking Eve on TV. The first
Time I recall firecrackers going off at midnight
Was at the end of 1987, when I was in Hoboken
With a sometime lover and some friends.
It was snowing and people on the street
Were popping off small fireworks randomly.
I drove away down a dark white interstate
And was, as they say, lucky to get home alive.
In 1999 in Chicago, my girlfriend and I spent
The afternoon in bed watching the millennium
Crawl across the globe and when our turn
Came, we stood at the window of our hotel room
Wrapped in a blanket to watch the anticlimax
Of a second-rate display over Lake Michigan.
(Chicago had parceled its fireworks displays
And distributed them around town, fearing
Too large a gathering and the Millenium Bug.)
Las Vegas, New Orleans, Chicago again,
But I didn’t see fireworks for the holiday again
Until I moved to Salt Lake City, in the aughts,
When I would sometimes watch them
From my downtown condo balcony
While my New-Year’s-Eve despising wife slept.
In ‘08, with a new fiancée in Takaka, New Zealand
I watched a pitiful few squibs over a warm bay.
After that, it wasn’t until a couple of years ago
That a new year came in again with a display.
I took my daughter to our small town celebration
Outside Zion, which was set off early enough
For a five year-old. And last year, as a family,
We watched the same charming local show
From our backyard. It was good enough, although
I knew when it started that this year would be
Impossible for us. And then here I was,
An honest revenant at the end, not much,
But still breathing some weeks after freezing,
Back in Salt Lake as a guest, while daughter slept
Next to a glow-in-the-dark flower we’d sculpted
And the complete Harry Potter volumes.
Our hosts-in-law had gone upstairs to bed.
The fireworks were heard from our perspective
As distant, sprinkled gunfire, invisible from here,
And I watched the Times Square ball drop
That I’d only seen in person once, in 1989,
The night my grandfather died in his bed,
And who knew what time really was anywhere?

Thumbs Up, 1500 South, Salt Lake City, 30 December 2017

Nothing like a small house party to prove
That human sociality is dangerous, to humans
In particular. Or perhaps the man who lied
By implication, suggesting he was cheerful
And social and capably human himself, maybe
More capable, even, than most, was just
His own threat to his own well-being,
And the rest of the folks were simply being
Folks being nice. Well, wait, all but one. One
Was like him but more obviously, pacing
The room relentlessly, tugging the ends
Of her hair and smiling only to herself.
He watched, or more accurately, he witnessed
Her and her patterns, and he knew that she
Was the only honest soul in attendance,
The one whose frantic, ritualized routines
Came only to show how cold the rest were,
How cold the cheerful human world, and dumb.
She nodded when he saluted her, in the midst
Of other nonsense, with one raised thumb.

Sugar House Liquor Store, Utah, 29 December 2017

The young stock clerk with the fanciful beard
And waxed moustaches carried open boxes
Of California vintages. His left bicep sported
A detailed tat of a finback whale skull and skeleton.
A customer sent him on a quest for an Arizona
Label that no longer existed. He apologized
For its nonexistence, but the jovial customer
Was happy to blame droughts and fires
And global warming. “This could all be wine
Country someday,” joked the clerk. “Get in
On the ground floor.” Another customer
In the checkout line noticed a local vodka
From the Sugarhouse Distillery, chuckling.
Outside, the Great Salt Lake retreated, but
All kidding aside, people were shopping
More for the end of the year than the world.
It’s only the arbitrary reality one counts on.

The More Things Stay the Change, 28 December 2017

It was the nature of the frog to be compliant
That doomed the pair, not the failure
Of the scorpion to sheath its tail. I had been
This frog on more than one occasion
And was saved the first few times merely
By the fact that it was not a scorpion I bore.
So I knew that I could have been stung
And sunk before, but still it was my nature
To swim across open bodies of water
And to show off how useful I could be,
Homely and awkward on land though I was.
Even my whining to the scorpion at the end,
The part of the affair now famously packaged
As dark morality, only showed that I could not
Grasp my own witlessness in being
So easily persuaded to attempt something
As stupid as to carry a rhetorical scorpion
On my soft, fat, vulnerable back into depths
No scorpion could survive. The last comment
Of the scorpion itself was lost to all but me:
“Why did you cruelly agree to carry me
To where you knew my drowning a certainty?”
Now that I’m a ghost, I can see there’s a reason
No one spots frogs ferrying other species,
And the fact that the scorpion ended
As equally unhappily hardly comforts me.

Half Moon Foothills, 27 December 2017

“What would you do to be guaranteed
One additional, on-demand hour of calm,
Confidence, and pain-free contentment?
What would you do for borrowed wings?
Then don’t condemn the pill thief, the drunk,
The one-armed-bandit lover. Or go ahead,
Son. Maybe condemnation’s the very thing
That does for you what self-destruction
Does for the condemned. Righteousness
Is one proven antidote to hopelessness.
Not one person sneering at the collaborator,
Exposed, the hooker disrobed, the sinner
Of any piquant kind or flavor disclosed breathes
That fire, that curling smoke, without hope.
Righteous anger’s no cure for desperation, true,
But then, neither is any uplifting addiction.
Your human frame’s the result of rewiring
More ordinary reward systems for living
The fit life that leaves more life behind dying
But in such a way that cumulative organization
Balances on individual obsession. Sooner
Than civilization collectively thinks, however,
There won’t be any need for our bodies
Thus framed to win civilizations’ competition.
I’m not kidding, kid. I get off on the notion
That everything we’ve been fine-tuned
To keep in motion will prove irrelevant soon.
Soon we’ll be less than batteries for the words
And numbers carrying on outside of our brains
In anthroformed farmed ecosystems they made
That never have to sleep, dream, or swoon
With any imagination of their own.” Daedalus
Crooned this in the ear of Icarus that afternoon,
That intoxicating, optimistic afternoon.
“That’s my hour of contentment stolen
Without a chance, dance, drug or smug
Sense of moral superiority necessary,
My dizzying vision under a winsome moon.”
Icarus knew his father of invention was a myth
Well suited to swift extinction. Still, he flew.

Rest Stop North of Toquerville, Utah, 26 December 2017

The weather was unusually mild, and I
Was on my way to fetch a child. I stopped
To gather my tattered wits about me
And failed to stop entirely. The off-ramp
Somehow led me back of the parking lot,
Back of beyond, through a turn in junipers
And straight back on to the interstate again.
What could it possibly mean, to have been
So distracted that I kept going smoothly
And arrived at my destination in time?
You know what I want you to infer. The road
Can never be abandoned while we ride it,
And we might as well carry onward as rest.
Maybe. Maybe I just made a witless mistake.
Maybe witlessness and insight are the same,
Not because witlessness is wisdom, but
Because neither is wisdom. The same.
Although there are no equivalencies, actually,
And all seeming samenesses are off-ramps
Through the back of beyond and straight
Back onto the freeway again. In the event,
The weather up north was grim by the time
We returned, but the child and I were grinning
And the house was warmly lit when we walked in.

Living the Good Afterlife, Christmas 2017

Sun lit the high gables of the neighbors,
The snow on their shingles glowing gold.
Memory sat on a couch on the edge
Of an abyss excavated in less than a decade.
Experience did its level best to convince me
Nothing in that experience was real, or if
It were real, it was not a reality that cared
To reveal what was really going on with it.
Now, why would experience contradict itself
Like that, why would experience try to tell me
That? To accept the argument for illusion
Is to implicitly accept both the distinction
Between the illusory and the real, as well
The notion that the real is greater, beyond.
If it were all illusion, then the label mattered
Not in the slightest, so why bother
With the pejorative? I suspected what I sensed
Amounted more to multiple hints in the form
Of discrepancies, hints of something neither
More nor less real or illusory, but other than,
An extension beyond experience, at least
As experienced so far, to far different senses
Of experience nonetheless rooted or linked
In this, this seeming illusory, seeming unreal.
Incompleteness is not necessarily trickery,
And this cosmos is nothing if not incomplete.
It’s not as if the dead know they’re gone, nor
As if the living know for certain they’re not.