The Road Between Nevers, Utah, 7 November 2016

I'm inordinately fond of greeting inanimate objects,
Plants, and nonhuman animals. I suspect
It's as close to religion as I'll ever get, and I'm about
As close to being among those greeted as I'll ever get
As an I. Once you're among them, you can't
Respond, not as a being responding. Oh maybe
The ponies, sure. Perhaps even the plants have a voice.
But they're intermediate anyway, not all the way home.
To be home is to be welcomed despite nonexistence
As a self. I'm fond of greeting anything close to home.

Kolob Terrace, Utah, 6 November 2016

Resting on a lichen-colonized hunk of basalt on a steeply bouldered slope
Peering west toward the laccoliths once again, the common complaint
That we can't time travel at will seemed a bit churlish to me.
That we travel at all, we time travel, and here my body and its inhabitants,
Its pronomial and hand-me-down memories, seemed to be, returned
As well as magically to a cliff I'd hadn't glimpsed in oh, say, ten or so weeks.
That we come into being, that we must cease to be, it was all time travel to me.
The sunlight slowly burned my skin, transforming the balanced suite of me.
The gambel oaks had shed their leaves. Pines and prickly pear
Danced dull green pavanes less obviously. A fly inspected my recently arrived
But amazingly ancient feet. A great collection of crumbling-becoming
Time machines lay heaped to the horizon, some of them me and some everything.

Syntithenai, Rockville, UT, 5 November 2016

All the ducks will have to die, I thought to my I, listening
To them make a ruckus on a pre-dawn pond nearby. Also,
I wondered if there's any chance at all that that's the test,
If some other version of a person, outside all this life
And death world, opted to volunteer to see how long
Before the punishing terms of this existence made it crack.
How much evidence of being stuck in a situation in which
Every being is stuck, however pathetically, perhaps comically,
Quack, having to die would such a being have to accept
Before surrendering? And is every being here, sweet morning light,
Under exactly this same, gethsemantic stress? The sun rose, bright.

Two Places I'll Have Never Been, 4 November 2016

Blind Willie Johnson wanted someone to tell him, "Just what is the soul of a man?"
How did he know there was a message, even when we didn't understand
The meaning? I sat by the side of the highway near the ruins. Nothing doing.
I walked up a bit of the Coal Pits Wash. Sweet in-between hour, not a soul.
Soulless. I visited Mama Earth Park and perched beneath old cottonwoods
Shedding this year's last left leaves into the year-round creek. Peaceful.
Again, not a soul. Very nice. And then I remembered me. Someone else
Arriving to find me already seated, reading, writing, and breathing
Could be forgiven for also finding the moment in the low-edged daylight
Soulful, or at least occupied. Preoccupied. But that's not the way it was
And not the way it will be, once my long-gone actual soul comes back for me.
At either end, when I could not have had and shan't have opportunity to be,
My soul is possession of nothing itself and there has been, will have, never be.

Long Dragon, Utah, 3 November 2016

A day said to itself, I am an I, I am a day, I shall consider the day:
To my left a continuous line of scalloped, reddish sandstone ridges
Proceeded in a ring that extended under the highway to my right
And did not end until well past the morning vicinity I tend to call home.
I imagined, in my arch and serene blue self with all the time in the world,
Oblivious to the clouds skirting my horizon and nodding like lambs politely,
I could recognize the entire edge of eroding earth below me as the curled tail
Of a dragon I'd long since conquered, although it had no more head nor torso.
So I straddled it a while, confident but a little blue above my vanquished world,
Like a bird, puzzled, still hungry after getting only the lizard's detachable tail,
Until I began to slip and fall, embarrassed, into the west, as I saw it, I guess.

Gnotobiosis, Dry Fishbowl, Adams House, 2 November 2016

"If you're upset, write a poem," wrote the prosaic essayist, clearly
A little bit upset about something, perhaps by the lack of poems
Being written. I knew what I knew, said the goldfish. I drove around
Dry ground all day, all afternoon, searching for the combination
Of recent and near, old and removed, that would turn into lines
The way that iron filings and certain microorganisms know to do.
I wanted the right name for it. I was not so upset, less than a week before
The big American presidential election set to transform the world,
Big deal, whether one believes in the last gasping piscine vote, or no.

The Enchanted Forest, 1 November 2016

In my cruel thoughts where I find death, nel fero pensier 

Dove io trovo morte, it didn't work. The idea was to escape,

Not to hang around hoping for a handout. I carry the forest

With me that the forest has always carried within it. So I'm here,

When I thought I'd be nowhere. Now what can I do? Slip

Into your enchanted forest before you know I've entered you.

Here I am, you think to yourself, but you're already prone

To thinking you're me, lying prone at the bottom of the ravine

Thinking it didn't work, in the words of an Italian dead

Seven centuries before me now slipped into me. He he. What is this

Bird whose wings cut out those stars the branches let me see?