La Folia, Virgin River Gorge, Arizona, 7 December 2016

Seventy-five years ago an empire
Attacked a hegemonic republic.
All friends now. Swing your bagpipes round and round,
Dance your sackbuts, strum guitars. Twenty-four
Days ago, a fool, a puffing wind bag
Looked past the bole of an evergreen tree
On the rocks at the edge of the black ledge
And shrank back. Still breathes yet. Swing your bagpipes
Round and round, dance your sackbuts, strum guitars.

Honeydew, North Plaza, 6 December 2016

I was not caused by timeless law applied
To a timeless space of states. My story
Was a single evolution which can't
Be broken down into just laws and states
Alone. Here's where I was in the system,
Aphid dependent on bacteria,
True bug, hemipteran, sap sucker, small
Lamb in the fields of the ant colony,
Incapable of not secreting poems,
Incapable of escaping the ants,
Dependent on vigilant mandibles
To protect me from hungry ladybirds,
Helicopters hovering over me,
My keepers. Closed my eyes that I might feed.

Pending Heaven, Hurricane, Utah, 5 December 2016

The grey that gathered in the afternoon
Of denial, of rejecting phone calls
From well-calibrated machine strangers,
Was not fog, not something you'd say. It falls.
Attraction deformed Einstein's universe.
Patrolling light defined its prison walls,
And gravity became geometry,
But something about geometry crawls.
What could you have said, anyway, wasn't
Like the blarney any miscreant bawls--
Misquoted scripture, slang, faked high dudgeon,
Self-serving illogic? Pretty much all
You would and have written already on the air
That grey, black, blue, or white rose gravid with despair.

Each Year We Make Bets, Which One Day All Its Leaves Will Fall, Winderland Lane, 4 December 2016

So late in the lengthening year that even in this desert

Nearly all photosynthesis had quit, including poetry's

Equivalent, the praise within the lament, it went. O what

Made fatuous sunbeams toil to break earth's sleep

At all? They did not toil for thee. They struck, and the rest

Was always over with, not within, not without, rash profits

Skimmed off just before impending loss. I have studied

The many artifiscientific practices of prediction, anecdotal,

Magical, devotional, probabilistic, self-fulfilling, sly,

From a distance, mostly, being fascinated but incompetent

Apprentice to that sorcery. Reduction is stronger

Than truncation, wrote the contrarian cosmologist,

To which I would ignorantly add, truncation results

From reduction, slow, cyclical, or sudden, so that this year's lament

Peeled like petals, fell as today's stunned sun shower

Of wasted leaves to sprinkle this windless morning

In a dry yard in December, all dropping from the single tree stayed

Dark and handsome bronze to the last possible hour.

Lament lay in near perfect circle, a shuffled, layered, pleated skirt

Girdling its own asymmetrical roots with a lower halo 

Of fallen sky and sun machines, leaving only the praise tree, silent,

But smiling ridiculously in the direct light, much reduced,

Young green spent, gold profits spent, bronze losses spent, but silver

Trunk gleaming more brightly than ever, untruncated

Yet.

North Fork, 3 December 2016

Had a day when your impersonal world seemed

More personable than yourself? Wind blew hard

Through that wild beauty, the sky, and the creek 

Could be heard nonetheless, the small birds, even the light 

Could be heard to have said something nice. Nothing

Seemed to be bent on extinguishing anything singing,

And only my neurons insisted, kibitzing, sotto voce, 

When no one noticed, when I wasn't paying attention myself,

On pulling out reams and bolts of old grievances to fluff

From dusty trunks, to consider, to stage shapeless costume 

Dramas of swathed and cloaked memories mumming,

Debating imitation antique drawing room insults and victories

Until the whole thoughtless limbic, hormonal alert system,

Like a secondary-school false-alarm fire drill in the auditorium, 

Fired up, and I woke up with a snort to my own nonsense again,

Scolding my thoughts to open the window, to notice the wind,

The light wrapped around them with intimate consideration

For our infinite, infantile wish for consolation, the world

Briefly resting its head softly against us, commiserating.

At evening when the cold blew through the canyons

And the deer haunted the highways, dead or alive,

I gripped the wheel of my compact, battered vehicle, 

Half lyric, half shambles, joining my flat-throated tones

To the layers of murmuring, singing, and song,

To the hum of the engine, the thump of the wind,

The whoosh of the blood hammering hard at my ears,

The nightjar on the pine, the woodlark in the night,

All singing an old song of their own, once of mine,

Chorus scored for indifference, concern, and delight,

"There is no beginning or end, only the middle and nothing."

Roadside Hazard, Utah Border, 2 December 2016

I've always hoped knowing I hoped as people who know

Better hope, against hope, for the most irrational hope,
For undeserved blessings, spontaneous remissions, things
Of that sort, as the wicked and the lazy and the living hope,
As the deserving, the not here, the nowhere never have to hope again.
When I with my last hope am dashed, whatever world remains likely
May loathe my failure to confess I kept fate waiting at the door.
I do not hope to convince, then, when I'm not, but I'll hazard now:
I kept all well behind that door, well beyond the hour appointed,
And I saw my others joyful, all my candles at dark windows.

Memory Is a Metal Folding Chair, St. George, 1 December 2016

The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be

The name of the Lord, my parents used to say, usually
Ruefully, albeit mildly, resignedly, a theological shrug
Over some minor mishap, some unexpected disappointment.
Me, I was more intrigued by the sequence of the saying.
In our church was much testimony given, much witnessing
About times when, after the Lord, presumably, apparently,
Had taken away, the Lord definitely, absolutely returned
Ten fold, as that saying went. But no one ever witnessed
The phrase, the Lord taketh away, and the Lord giveth.
What were the reasons, I wondered. Rote: never change
A sacred saying. But there were bad puns we made, groaners
On famous Bible verses and biblical cognomens, all the time.
Rhythmic: it just feels weird to front the longer phrase.
But folks in our world had no discernible ear for prosody.
Four square, shout amen, then sit back in your folding chair.
I decided that it was actually, subtly, just orthodoxy. Reverse
The turn and it implies that something was there before the Lord
Came and took it away, that the Lord's subsequent
Gifts were substitutions, not the originals. Preserve the order,
However, the message is that all good comes from the Lord, so
He's entitled to take it back at his discretion, blessed be
His name. After that, I found myself back in my own folding chair
While another two-hour Sunday sermon droned on, until nudged
In the ribs by my embarrassed father, who wanted me to stop
Whispering to myself obsessively, the Lord taketh away,
And the Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away, and the Lord
Giveth, and the Lord taketh away, and the Lord giveth,
And the Lord taketh away. You would have thought I'd realized
Something about the way the universe works that day, the way
I clung to that monotonous tapestry frame, grimly stitching away.