Mourning Doves and Magpies Near Park City, Utah, 2 October 2018

But he turned his face to the wilderness
When the rains returned and the colors washed
Out of the branches. He saw the wild birds
On the edge of town, domesticating
Themselves for success at reproduction,
As his own ancestors had done. And now,
Look how things had become, every human
Head stuffed with the weight of the world of words.
Civilization itself was the rough
Beast come round to gobble up everyone.
As it was possible that the termites
And their wonderfully complicated mounds
Were servants of the fungus they tended
And fed from, the secret of their success,
Our bodies and minds, even the feral
Haunting the margins, were made the servants
Of the hovering bolus of culture
That fed us. But he turned his face away
From the obvious to the wilderness.

What Can I Doom That This World Has Not Doomed? Park City, Utah, 1 October 2018

The story carries me and all the other, littler

Stories I carry around inside me inside it.

Do you know the story of Balaam and Balak?

One was a technician, to begin with,

Of the polytheistic, superstitious sacred.

The latter was a king of Moab who bought in

To the ancient notion that a technician could

Help him. But the Lord of one encampment 

Thwarted him. The Lord got hold of Balaam.

Lots of jokes about an ass. Lots of tricks

For an audience of committed monotheists.

But the story contained its own self-destruct

Command in its satirical skepticism. Look,

God mocks the superstitions of pagans

And idols and con-artist magic men shamans.

Mockery based on evidence, however,

“You can’t do the things you say you can,”

Is universal acid. If the daimon doesn’t

Appear to the ass and Balaam, if Balaam is

No better than the pagan technician he was

Once your omnipotent God converted him,

Then what are we left with, ahem? Atheism

(And skepticism of superstitions, generally)

Was birthed with monotheism, with savaging

And laughing at the impotence of deities. Fin.

Set in a Fictional Present in Saint George, Utah, 30 September 2018

Another month is almost over, and there is
Nothing more arbitrary as a measure than
A month. A month can’t even match another
Month. And yet we arrange our lives around
These nothings dead samples of us invented.
The quality of nothing hath not such need
To hide itself. It is hidden. Hidden as itself.
Stand out under the stars if you are lucky
Enough to be able to see many stars. Ask
Yourself, whatever your deeply cherished
Set of theological, ideological, utterly borrowed
Beliefs, am I captive to a description
That exists only because millions of minds
Like me, outside of me, have scripted it?
Yes. The answer, if you were wondering,
As you read this, if any mind reads this,
Is yes. You are the captive of your beliefs.

Paperwork Underwater, Saint George, Utah, 29 September 2018

Sometimes, after sex, if you were well
Pleased with the results, especially well,
You would weep, briefly, and I could see
Diana’s moon jelly of tenderness pulse
In your teary eyes, then vanish. Back to being
Us again, two bundles of beings arranged
Parallel to one another under covers or,
As you preferred, under our picnic blanket
In the woods, on a lawn, on a cliff. Marriage.
Coupling. The public and the private faces
Of the special grief that never ends
In death but often begins well beforehand.
Doesn’t really matter who’s doing it, what
The local legislation and the ancient mores
Have to say about it. Bodies compounded
Of bodies, trillions of living cells, pulsing
Like jellies with desire, which is life, desire,
Line up as a pair of chromosomes, whether
The pairing of chromosomes in the event
Is likely, possible, improbable, or impossible.
Then, sooner or later, the ancients so much
Younger than the bodies their ideas inhabit
Will find a way to have their say. You may
Have lived in a time when this uncoupling
Or that coupling were outlawed. You may
Have been an outlaw, in another age, but
Today you are merely a floating awareness
Of a compounded being, holding a sheaf
Of printed paper, stapled by a secretary,
Stating you are uncoupled, again, this time
Not by death but, by definition, by divorce.

Last Light, Saint George, Utah, 28 September 2018

The sheerest honesty you could find
In any poem falls from Tracy Smith’s last
Half line, after a caesura so heavy it snaps
Into separate sentences, split statements,
One pretty lyric fragment, one bare gasp.
“Like a dark star. I want to last.”
She knows, we know, we all know, whether
We can drag ourselves half so close to candor
Or can’t, can’t, can’t. She, we, you, me can’t
Last. I like to stress the fact we’re falling fast,
But I’m rarely naked enough, transparent
To my own hankering as the wind rushes
Past. I know the landing lies ahead of me,
Know even the saints and sages have to smash,
Say it daily, like a mantra, toughen my eyes
By focusing on the crash. But I want to last.

A Hermit Conquers Nothing in Saint George, Utah, 27 September 2018

Looking out across a desert landscape
Pocked with irrigated trees and suburbs,
The eye was most often drawn to the rim
Of buttes, mesas, plateaus, rumpled red
Hills, black folds, and cream-colored cliffs
That ringed the scene like a cradling wall,
Or up to the high, expansive skies. One time,
However, it was the collection of steeples,
The seven distinct white-painted needles
That I could count sticking out from green
Clumps in low-lying housing developments.
Each one represented another Mormon ward
With its own tidy neighborhood to serve.
I had been reading another exchange
In the long running debate about Darwinism
And eusociality in various colony species,
Bees, ants, termites, naked mole rats.
Inevitably, one scientist opined, as if
He had secret knowledge, hermetic,
Possibly heretical, that, really, competition
Is much overrated, while cooperation,
Not to be too touchy-feely about it,
Was commoner than is thought and more
Powerful. This is a sub-debate in the greater
Debate about how cooperation evolved,
Given life’s apparent preference for struggle,
The inevitable limiting force of scarcity,
And every life form’s hunger. One side
Finds cooperation puzzling, aberrant.
The other side finds it fundamental, fine,
Maybe even uplifting. Then they quarrel.
Humans. Cooperation is both so obligatory
And so fungible for us, we are unsettled
By either its apparent absence or perfection.
Here, let me play the part of the scientist
Possessed of hermetic, heretical knowledge.
Cooperation is not an alternative
To competition, nor wholly not
Competition. Cooperation is
A competitive strategy, a type,
A wickedly effective and sophisticated
Type of competition. Cooperation
Amplifies competition, raises the stakes,
Ramps up the intensity, ever since the first
Cooperation between unicellular
Organisms, down through those billions
Of years of their aggressively aggregating
Descendants. Army ants are cooperators,
As are armies. As are lynch mobs, martyrs,
Gangs and churches. The greater the scale
Of cooperation, the more ruthless
The competition becomes. To miss that
Is to wholly misunderstand the nature
And function of cooperation. Cooperation,
If I may repeat myself, is murder. Still,
I like the pretty architectures of our worship.

The Navigator Aground in the Mountains, 26 September 2018

Not much happens. This is a long, dark story
And I will save it for another time. Inferences:
Time has passed; you were asleep; you will die.
These are not experiences. Inferences only.
You guessed time passed, you slept, you must die.
Not much happens on the bright, daylight side
Of the story either. One may itemize. (Jet,
Breeze, squirrel, doe, car turning around
At the trailhead and vanishing again.) Light
On the early autumn foliage offers clues
For inference and cues for leaving, but
Not much happens in the long, dark story.
Plato once composed a ridiculous analogy.
He imagined and asked us to imagine a ship
On which the captain was besieged by sailors
Who knew nothing of navigation but only
Wanted to seize the helm, in hopes of taking
The ship. Meanwhile, these ruthless idiots
Thought the true navigator a useless wordsmith
And star-gazer. Plato (pretending to be
Socrates) thus conceived the ship of state.
He meant, I suppose to flatter himself.
A navigator was a clever comparison
For a contentious philosopher, to be sure,
“See look, we with our heads in the stars
Are the ones really in the know, technicians
Of the practical means to reach shore.” But
On what ship ever was there neither knowledge
Nor respect for navigation? The buffoonish
Sailors and their captain are cartoons. I have
Tinkered with words and angered at stars
My whole adult life, and like pretend Socrates
I should know I don’t know at all where to go.
Not much happens, and then it all sinks at once
Or my ship comes in. One day. Maybe. Meanwhile,
Not enough happens out on the becalmed
Waves where the ghost ship without sailors
Tells stories to itself about true navigators.
Not enough happens to redeem what does.