Bossing Around a Rare Rainy Afternoon in Saint George, Utah, 30 November 2018

A small dog on a rhinestone leash spun
In circles whenever the dog’s walker tried
To compel its reluctant obedience. A woman,
Clearly sympathizing with the dog’s walker,
Said she thought the dog was a real handful,
As don’t we most. Inequality is the first rule
Of human rules, and all of rules are human.

A Day Before the First Serious Snows Came to Pine Valley, Utah, 29 November 2018

Information about the past is the past.
The past is information. It can be read
To make more past, more information,
Or it can be left, latent, forgotten until
It disintegrates and is lost. Not the past
Anymore, just more of what never was
Because now it truly isn’t. I knew a post-doc
Once, a taphonomist who dissected
And dated pack-rat middens to reconstruct
Climate history. She had to apply information
To get information, but in those ugly tangles
Of desiccated debris, radiocarbon dated,
She could pull out seeds and pollen to see
What grew, how wet or dry were the seasons,
How little lives shifted through centuries.
Nothing much humbler than old rat middens,
But behold the past elaborated within them!
Enough to envision whole swaths of ecosystems.
A triple ecosystem myself, body composed
Of trillions of microscopic clones hosting
Trillions more of even tinier prokaryotic beasts,
All in turn environment for a mind haunted
By competitive patterns of inherited words,
I, and we, watched daughter’s caged gerbils
Industriously digging through fresh bedding,
Digging tunnels, heaping nests, gnawing
Sticks to papery shreds, rearranging caches.
Occasionally one would dig down to a corner,
Hit glass, but for a while continue digging,
Scrabbling futilely, paws a weird whispering.
I, also we, looked up from where we tapped
At a glass screen of whispering, industrious
Us composing new pasts from old sticks
And fresh bedding. Ah, all so busy, busy,
Ahead of the storms, heaping up middens.

Painted Pony, Saint George, Utah, 28 November 2018

We are only words within a work of ruinous
Ambition, a long, uncoiling, segmented,
Circular, echoing hymn of disaster, at times
Attaining actual profundity of thought, style,
But lapsing, time and again, into sentiment,
Bathos, outright silliness. Thus, a life,
A journal in perpetual metamorphosis,
A lyric assemblage, blue bower of the bird
Compelled to assemble it from anything
Not nailed down, portable, the right color,
The stolen, uneven commonplace book
Of the metaphorical liar, an argument
Of appreciation that every thing you wrote
Was true of that is equally true of this, of us.
We came from somewhere else, long ago.
By now, perhaps, we rule another world. By now,
Perhaps, no beast remains who can speak us.
We form an existence, nonetheless, however listless.
Phrase by phrase, we lay us down, now beastless.

A Parasite Vastly Larger Than Its Hosts, 27 November 2018

Body, growing lighter daily, sat heavily
Down in a broken-bottomed wicker chair
As if daring it to collapse, as if on a dare.
The world was coining new worlds daily
And body dangled off one twiggy end
Of the globe’s collective brain. The brain
Wanted to claim it was cloning not coining,
Was charming, not cloning. Body wanted
To wander around in it, to argue with it, only
If, if only, body could win. The branching
Forest of symbols, glowing with its own light
But shading out the sun and filtering stars,
Was gathering body in, a moldering fruit
That could never have managed original sin.

Thunder Mountain, Saint George, Utah, 26 November 2018

A pretend volcano with a pretend pterosaur
Belched pretend rumblings and fumes, rivers
Of red Christmas lights for lava, over the children’s
Playground of triceratops-shaped slides, dancing
Fountains from the painted cement T-Rex.
One entrance to the play park went through the real
Cemetery beside it, with many stone benches
For contemplation encircling the plotted graves.
Actual lava littered the ground, revenants of flows
That poured over sandstones containing evidence
Of actual dinosaurs, of other species, tracks
And bones. The most strenuous imagination
Echoed, faintly, the presently remaining past.
Leaving past the tombstones, daughter happy
And fresh-faced after two hours play in the park
Asked from the back where body should like
To be buried, while specifying that her father,
Old already, live better, live long enough to allow
Her a long life herself with him always in it.
Body laughed, faintly echoing the remaining past.

Partially, 25 November 2018

Cinderella met a man in a hole. Even in a field
Of plenty, an absence is something to behold.
There is something that I need to tell you,
Something that has never been told: tell,
In the Indo-European language family, has
Its origins in counting, in enumeration. Stories
Are recounted. But epic, in the same family,
Has its roots in song. To number or to sing,
To counter or to celebrate, half of the whole thing.

Quail Creek Reservoir, 24 November 2018

Here’s a falsifiable hypothesis: the same
Beast who starts out gloomiest before dawn
And gets progressively more upbeat until
Evening, nearly each and every day, composes
Brighter, more cheerful verses in the mornings
Than in the evenings or past midnight, when
Most of the beast’s compositions get done.
How is this falsifiable? Let’s take as a given
The well-established pattern of mood change
Throughout the typical day, certainly for this
Beast but probably common to many, maybe
Most of the species. Analyses of moods
On social media show much the same trend.
Then, giving that we have a set of thousands
Of texts composed by the same beast over
Several years, at all hours of the day, but
Primarily at night, we can retrospectively
Test our paradoxical hypothesis analytically.
And? The analysis refutes the null. Verses
Composed earlier in the daylight hours
Are significantly more likely to be cheerful,
Even silly, even absurdly pointless, just as this
Composition, overlooking gold cottonwood
And willow around the shining reservoir
In the midst of black lava, red and buff sandstone,
Under a stippled sky on a quiet morning, is.