Muddy River Diner, Moapa, Nevada, 8 April 2019

Li Bai stopped at pubs a lot.
He liked to get drunk.
He liked to tip the singers.
He liked to hear the folk songs.

No folk songs in Nevada,
Not counting streaming country
Pop or the siren jingles
Of three dusty slot machines.

How would an asyntactic,
Calligraphic, terse,
But soulful Chinese poet

Find his way in this setting?
Five diners. Windows. Five words.
Wine. Server. Busboy. Talk. Birds.

No, we can’t do it.
We can’t be asyntactic
And imagistic
And soulful and rhyme.

We don’t have the pictographs,
The Mandarin, the folk songs
Stored up in us in order

To accomplish
The lyric equivalent
Of binding our feet.
And we’re just not drunk.

The busboy complains
To the middle-aged server
That although he’s great
Making friends with other guys

He just can’t make it
With the girls. The server laughs,
And then she explains to him,

“All you gotta do’s relax.”
Outside arched windows
Occasional birds fly by.

For My Introductory Anthropology Students in Saint George, Utah, Who Often Look Bemused, 7 April 2019

Envision a human as a sailboat, with culture for the sails and biology for the rudder and hull. You can’t reduce a sailboat to a rudder and hull, especially not if you want to explain how it sails, but, if you reduce it to its sails, then it’s no longer a boat and the sails go nowhere at all.

There are lots of other sorts of boats afloat that are not sailboats. Think of all the other living creatures without human culture as these sorts of boats without sails. Most of them have rudders and all of them have hulls. Now, a human in full sail, a conquering fleet of humans, is a glorious, exhilarating, awesome, extinguishing, and probably colonizing sight to behold. But any fleet can still be sunk by storms or other fleets with sails. Even canoes can have a go. And every boat sinks once its hull’s breached, no matter how full and fine are the sails.

Cultural differences, of course, would be differences in sails. A whole hull under torn sails drifts sadly and is likely to be abandoned. Unless it’s a Viking longboat, with lots of oars and hordes of hairy homunculi to pull them. Then, although it should avoid the open seas, it will still haul itself up deltas and do serious damage to the locals despite the tattered rags of its one colorful sail.

Hulls are not destiny. Anchors can be lifted. Rudders can split. Never blame poor or fancy sailing on the hull. Of course, some Polynesian sails have double hulls below their platforms and are more stable and can more safely cross open oceans than can sails that pull only one hull. It’s not destiny, never destiny, but still. You have to admire some hulls.

Remember that your parents don’t necessarily sew much of your sails, although they did provide the hull. Hulls—well, and masts, too, let’s be honest—come from the dark forest. But sails can be made of various textiles, and whenever you spot elaborately imbricated sets of sails catching the wind in a yacht race, however strong your aesthetic response, bear in mind the vast network of power relations that produced their significations. Let the horror of the race dawn, staggering your mind.

What? No, not that kind of race. That race concept belongs to the sails, not the hull, by the way. A yacht race here is just part of our conceit. No, not conceited, it's--Someone had a hand up? No? Never mind.

Anyway. Everybody got it? Good. Now let’s consider kinship.

Shaggy Barguest Stories in Zion, 6 April 2019

An angel, a bear, a dog, a baby, and a monkey
Walk into a body. A body, self, and puppet
Walk into a committee meeting. A ghost,
A poem, and an angel bump into a god.
A self, a soul, a mind, words, and portable devices
Stroll into a book. Chance, pollution, purity,
Danger, what might happen, and what comes
After walk into a bar together. The language
Of religiosity persists, long after the faith
Has deceased. Oh God, my God, why must
Thou inhabit me? A monk, a rabbi, a sadhu,
And a priest march into the river. The ferryman
Looks up from his nap and, after scrutinizing
Them for a moment as they wade and begin
To sink, observes, “I see you folks can’t afford
A lift, but is there something you want to drink?”

Not New Harmony, Utah, 5 April 2019

Even better yet, it’s a mistake. New Harmony
Is a community of a couple hundred souls,
Twenty kilometers or so due west. For a route
With roads, it's maybe forty, forty-five minutes
Up and around from Virgin by car, on the far side
Of the interstate, edge of Pine Valley Wilderness.
The old Harmony was Fort Harmony, washed out
When its adobe walls melted in the Great Flood
Of 1862. So there. The software triangulates
To the nearest municipality in a straight line,
And at some point in the middle of these cliffs
Without any town or village near, it flips
From labeling this Virgin to stating New Harmony,
Although here’s well outside the bounds of either.
It’s odd, perhaps, that the mapping engineers
Chose to configure the software’s program
To assign town names to current locations that way,
But it’s not wholly their fault and not at all
The fault of the software. Blame the nature
Of names. New Harmony’s boundaries are
Arbitrary as any noun’s, any label’s, and it is not
Only difference that distinguishes difference,
Not only that New Harmony cannot be Virgin,
But that there are vast expanses of experience
To which no names apply, neither Fort nor New
Nor Virgin nor Harmony nor Zion nor the difference
Between any of them, but necessarily outside.
I’ve driven past the actual speck of New Harmony
Maybe a hundred times. Never saw the exit sign.

The Logical Unity of Contradictory Pleas to Remain in Memory, Utah, 4 April 2019

I am neither one principle nor two.
I am all principles of me as you,
Of us as facts that make true statements true,
Of us as possessions we can accrue,
Possessions we longed for when we were new,
Possessions we still consume to renew,
All our selves we will lose without a clue,
Not even looked for anymore, our due.

Every moment marks a turn in the way
Of understanding, as well as a way
Of understanding we can never say
We understand again. We are at play
In games of our own making, night and day,
Nothing, no one, no two, remaining. Stay.

Books Are a Kind of Dream Sleep in Pine Valley, Utah, 3 April 2019

Most marriages made for love have also been arranged by the lovers
For convenience. We mustn’t say so, but it’s true. Repenting
At leisure, later, we try to figure how to raise the whole arrangement
Like an old barn under new roof. Just when we think we understand
Something, we peel off another layer of paint and find complications
Wriggling, our private nest of thriving termites underneath. Anything
To serve love’s swollen, droning royalty, who alone preserve our colony.
We see that there’s something more we’re missing and that we can’t see
Clearly what it is. All convenient arrangements in the name of love,
Or faith, or art, are equally aspirational simulacra of the condition
We hope someday to be in, to have been in. The transformation
May not be miraculous, may begin, but rarely does it complete itself.
Leave off the mind-reading and attend to the movements
And responses of the myriad partnered things. Intertwining
Exchanges and alterations produce a great diversity of wriggling
Differences under the skin of any tranquil scene. We can try.
We can try to change our minds. We can make love
Because love is an art, a faith, a thing that must be made. Once,
We dreamed of being snapped up for a song by a somebody
With an uncontrollable urge to string us along. Artifice. Now,
We have to leave behind the home we then arranged. We may
Yet save ourselves, keep the well-foxed library, dream, but we can’t
Fix love’s twisting, falling beams. And we must share the offspring.

Jerome’s Dream, Baker Dam Reservoir, Utah, 2 April 2019

Signs and natural wonders commingled familiarly.
Words on screens translated from words on paper
Translated from words on vellum translated
From parchment scrolls translated from clay
Sauntered and sashayed through the thoughts of the day,
The immediately recent, typically southern Utah day,
Where the eroding sand smelled damp by the pond
Dammed up and brown, surrounded by its fringe
Of cottonwoods at the receding spring shore,
Ridges of juniper-piñon receding away,
Last year’s leaves fluttering like small creatures
On the ground, so light and silvery grey, they seemed
Like litter reflecting the sun, like lizards when they skittered.
An actual lizard skittered. A raven announced
And was answered repeatedly by a put-upon scrub jay.
A jet dragged a contrail and its subsequent grumble overhead.
A cigarette butt, a skein of discarded paper wrapper,
A piece of glass emerged from the sand as actual
Litter. Nothing much. Sit close enough to the margins
And you could listen to the little riplet waves the breezes made.
Poor Saint Jerome, irascible fanatic, one of the best
Figures to symbolize his transitional age, one of the last
Romans to start out pagan, to receive a classical education.
He dragged his library into the desert. He tortured himself.
He tortured the women who believed in his vision
Of virginity, celibacy, suffering, starvation. He learned
Arabic and Syriac, Hebrew from actual Jews.
He translated frantically, too fast, too polemically.
Eventually a mob of other angry Christians
Burned even his library, as they burned down so many.
He died blindly working on one last commentary.
Along the way, early on, he had a fever dream
That Jesus was actually beating him for preferring
Pagan literature to the reading of translated scriptures,
For being a Ciceronian. He vowed never to read
The old Romans again. Later, he made excuses,
Used the Deuteronomist no less, to make them, and read.
Mostly he made contentious, scholarly, biased translations
That shaped the world to come for centuries, a millennium,
His idiosyncratic translations of texts ancient in his day, made
From parchment made from papyrus and sheepskin translations
Of impressions made in damp and then baked-hard clay.
By the little pond in the desert scrub when the breezes played
His signs, translated and translated again, into a language
Nonexistent in his day, through a medium nonexistent
In his day, continued to beat him down among the wonders
Of this part of the world he would never have guessed,
Part never mentioned by his Jesus, although settled
By those whose Jesus they believed came by here once,
To a far-off, unholy, Christless, ordinary day.
A long, black bird floated down to the actual lake.