The Electric Theater, Tabernacle Street, 7 September 2016

The light was white bright on the street at noon.
Respectably dressed white people with white hair crossed
Between the bright white lines of the crosswalk
And entered the cool, dark theater, me among them.
The seats filled up. The lights went down.
The ambient sounds of Moby caressed us,
And the screen filled with a flying scene above Epupa Falls
In Kaokaland, then cut to a kraal and a small, ashy fire
Where a Himba elder no older than the theater audience
Murmured about witchcraft, drought and the death of Himba culture.
Just as I realized I could smell the elder, the strong sage odor,
The butter and dung-perfumed ochre, a disoriented memory--
The Himba woman hitchhiking, sitting tall in the back of my old rented truck
Seven years and more ago, her leather crown brushing the underside of the roof,
Her ochre rubbing into the gray fabric of the seat, calm, going to see her father
At the rural clinic twenty minutes dirt drive distant, that Kaokaland smell
The open grassland carried--I realized I had smelled nothing entering
The theater, despite, presumably, perfumes and hairsprays, nothing.
Nothing is like a memory.

Utah Under Glass, Dixie Campus, 6 September 2016

Seventeen months ago, I walked a formerly local candidate
Who had done her dissertation on instructional word art
Into this room to meet the provost, when she exclaimed
That her uncle, or perhaps it was her grandfather, had made
The giant, glass-topped meeting table that dominates the room.
A mosaic sandstone map of Utah is set into the wood
Beneath the glass. This afternoon in the dim room
With the shuttered blinds and the projector hanging
Perilously over the pieces shaping the heart of southern Utah,
I placed hands flat on the glass, feeling the hum
Of twenty minor campus administrators discussing
What should be done about fees and course outcomes,
And it dawned on me that the candidate had only come
To see the giant table her kin had made, never intending
To accept any offer of return here to her air-conditioned home.
I splayed my crooked fingers wider and noticed a brass plate
Fastened to my end of the massive geography. It read
"Utah table made under the direction," but the line below
Had been blurred away by however many bellies and laps
Had leaned against the edge, pressing some conversation.
Or she could have been lying, or been lied to by her kin,
I thought, about who actually created this particular state,
And reflections of the projector colored the glass.

East Zion Turnout, 5 September 2016

Labor Day in the United States, the hundred-year old

National Park Service straining to process another long weekend,

The end of summer holidays. The visitors were already draining

Back out of the park by sunset, Monday, with the bulk of the locals

Or relatively locals, the plump families with school-age children, mostly gone.

The trails still rather bustled with people from overseas, fit young adults 

And wan silver-haired elders, European and East Asian, by and large.

Well, what of it? The rocks looked like the rocks. The weather was typical,

Sunny and robin's-egg blue and pretty hot, but no longer brutal.

I took the truck for a pointless drive through the crowds across to the east side,

Where the trailheads boast a small parking lot and a picnic table

And a variety of familial memories for me. A landscape, a vivid,

Corrugated landscape that's easy to recognize, hard to forget,

Seems to demand some kind of response, to suggest that here is a place

That is firm enough for you to rappel your way back down by,

Although there is a long tunnel drilled right through the heart of it,

And every time it rains hard or snows then thaws they have to close 

The roads to clear away the latest fallen rubble, and the shapes

That we most love to photograph with our flitting selves posed against them

Are all cracking and falling erratically as we snake in exhausting, constant lines

Through the middle of them, millions of us, shouting and documenting

How we travelled to show that we have seen such giant, magnificent fractures

In person, us, the ones you know from other contexts, see, we were there.

Translations, Brian Head, 4 September 2016

In the argot of physicists it meant changing your place.
I am not a physicist, and I do not believe in place.
There never was a space, no spacetime, only change. The room was loud
With the wall unit roaring to life over and over all night.
I dreamed and then dreamed that I dreamed,
And then dreamed that I was annoyed by the idiocy
And irrelevance of all my dreaming. But how could I find them
Irrelevant, to what? If this universal heap of sweepings
Must always have been moving in all measures, and it was,
Like the ever-changing light outside my room,
Like forever redacted stories about bright suns and dark suns,
Gods and explosions and angels and black holes
Decorating the day and the night, never once in their place,
Then in reference to what, exactly, were my dreams
Irrelevant or not? I sat at my dining table
At the end of the day, my table, my day, the blue
On blue on blue desert sky rhyming
With previous cloudless passages I'd known,
And sensed the lamp light at my back creeping up
On me, predatory. It seems I had been through
Yet another sequence accelerating my rate
Of translation, this time from mountaintop to canyon floor,
The automatic hotel heater roared. I had left the window ajar all night.

Mammoth Creek Road, 3 September 2016

I woke with dread in my gut and before I got far up the road
A pretty creature, sleek and ochre with a black-ash tipped tail,
Maybe a ferret or a type of weasel, ran out in front of my wheels.
I thought it might turn and dash back or speed up and make it through,
But it ran without alteration and I felt it hit a wheel.
I looked up but the vehicle behind me was already over it.
So a thing with desires and some sort of awareness came to an end.

I drove on, higher, through the cinder cone and lava plateaus.
The flows here were recent, so recent geologically
That the pine and aspen in these high country basalt landscapes
Look like survivors of the stones that overwhelmed them,
Although the freshest black rocks that tumbled stopped
At least one to five thousand years ago,
And the trees just got a grip in the past few centuries.

One handsome pronghorn stood in those pine shadows in basalt rubble,
Alone and engaged in no apparent behavior other than breathing.
It seemed improbable to me, that a creature of grass and speed
Was so high in wooded country and near so many bow hunters
On recon with their pickup trucks and roaring ATVs,
But what do I know of how life goes?

Ashdown Gorge Wilderness, 2 September 2016

Thirty-two hundred meters above sea level
And four weeks since I last sat on a pebbled flat
Pocked with small, scampering crabs scrabbling peekaboo
In the damp stone shadows as the Salt Spring Island tide rolled in,
I roll memories around in my mouth for their terroir
And the stupid pleasure of feeling how lucky I am
To have memories of having passed through such enviable names.
I shall have to be punished for my good fortune. Fortune
Itself shall be required to do the punishing, poor abstraction.
Bristlecone pines lurk near these arrowy spruce. Tense,
I can't settle on the best tense. This wind would have been
Brisk or even punishing, had I dared to set up a tent.
But I was intent on a short walk in the high country, that's all,
Nothing too daring. A sharp gust recalls that the beautiful
Well-surveyed, bounded pitches that get renamed wilderness
Generally remained more or less unoccupied by villages
Long enough to become said wilderness because villagers
Preferred not to live in them. It's never easy to settle vast passages.
It was hot, earlier, when I drove through Mountain Meadow,
Way down below these windy breaks, out on the paths of less resistance,
And visited the monument to a passing massacre on my roundabout way
From ordinary afternoon at work in town to this elevated vantage point.
No one was at that memorial as no one is now on the Rattlesnake Trail.
Winter will settle here soon enough, and skiers and snowmobiles,
And I'll be as much thoughts of those as they'll be the thoughts of the meadow.

Le roi du silence, The Watchman, 1 September 2016

Here we play a game. Whoever is the most 

Successful at keeping quiet despite the most

Outrageous provocations wins. Are you ready,

Children? Begin. Wait, no! Professor, I'm not ready,

I want to talk and talk.  I was under the cliffs at sunset

Just waiting for a load of laundry and savoring evening air

After a bit of rain and wind had broken the heat, alone

And in a quiet town, despite the tourists just blocks away,

And so all was ordinary and peaceful and birds

Were the noisiest chatterers, socializing in the greenery

Ahead of bed on a branch for the night, a fine glow

On the sandstone above all, also quiet, of course,

And I thought of the news item I'd heard this morning

Driving the highway outside Toquerville, a report

That French preschoolers and kindergarteners

Were now being trained to know how to be silent

During a terrorist attack by playing a game

Formerly used to calm rowdy groups of them.

A game is any charmed circle where the rules

Outside the circle, that are nature and can't be gainsaid,

Are disguised by the inside-the-circle rules that we made,

In which we pretend that we can't say for sure who will win

Until we play, can't say who could be the one king

Among us we know is the king of silence.