Clark Planetarium, 14 April 2018

Forty-five years ago in Manhattan,
An elementary school class from New Jersey
On a field trip to the planetarium sat hushed
In a circular room with a dome for a ceiling
As a bizarre device like a space station
In the shape of a dragonfly stripped of wings
Clicked and rotated, throwing points of light
Off the dome in the dark, the sky tonight,
The sky five thousand years ago, the sky
Scrutinized by the Magi, the future sky
Several tens of thousands of years to go,
And a man with a microphone narrated,
And that was the point of the trip, the whole show.
In Salt Lake City on a raw April weekend,
The actual planetarium at the Planetarium
Served as more of a sideshow only a fraction
Of visitors bothered to check out, given all
The tactile, digital displays of astronomy
And what we know of the world beyond
Our world, all the 3D IMAX showings.
The little theater still featured reclining seats
And a dome, and a man with a microphone
Who kicked things off with a warning
About stifling smartphones and their glow,
Then gave a five-minute talk about finding
Orion and a few other easy constellations
To pick out of the sky as it would look above
Salt Lake, beyond the clouds and city lights
That night. But the projector was no longer
A steel and glass monster of gears and bulbs,
Just one lens projecting software from the back
Of the upper row. And even in the planetarium
Most of the show was a movie replete
With computer graphics recapping astrology,
Ptolemy, Copernicus, Kepler’s Laws,
And some imagined future colony on Mars.
Any representative of evolving cultures,
Whether of words or numbers or both,
Should feel about this perhaps as a person
In a cottage might feel about mice or termites
In the walls, moss on the roof, ants on the floor.
It’s amazing, the tendency for storytelling
To take over the mostly tightly constructed,
Technologically advanced explanations.

Cold Spring Fever, 13 April 2018

A day spent sick in bed, dozing and reading
Of the income-leveling capacity of plagues,
Daughter in bed beside and coughing as well
Although without the fever, playing on a pad.
The great forest of the body reminds itself
That less than half its cells, a tenth of its genes
Are human, the rest a compact but vast
Ecosystem, currently unbalanced by a virus
Let loose among the commensals and familiars.
The implicated but more uniquely alien
Invaders of words and numbers, ruminations,
Are quite put out by having to compete
With a conventional pathogen for the brain’s
Attention, but oh well. We’ll be here tomorrow
When the virus is gone, and if the virus
Carries the whole body away with it,
We’ll quietly lie in wait for the next one.

The Ghost Haunted by the House, 12 April 2018

It was one of those disorienting moments
That actually deserve the term “surreal”
Because they jerk the perspective away
From the real enough, the ordinary real,
And into an alignment that shows something
Larger, like a glimpse of the ocean shining
Through what had seemed a solid forest
Crowding close. I was telling my daughter
An old anecdote, often retold by my mother,
About the first time she’d treated me
To a taste of ice cream as an infant, when
Daughter interrupted. “What expression
Did you make then, Papa?” Without thinking,
I answered, “I don’t know. I wasn't there.”
“Of course you were! It was you!” “Oh,
Right,” I said, sheepishly, but even as I nodded
I knew I’d been correct. I wasn’t there.

Sugarhouse Park, 11 April 2018

Joggers, bicyclists, kids, and dogs running

Around groomed lawns, past duck-filled ponds,

Surrounded by a constantly thrumming ring

Of trucks and cars. Stay far enough from anyone

To not focus on all the smart phones, and,

Apart from minor differences in costumes

And the designs of cars parked in the lots,

This could be an ordinary-seeming city scene

Any time in the past fifty years, or, my whole

Remembered life. So it’s easy to ignore

The alarming weirdness and unpredictable

Terrors that this sunny, normal-seeming spring  

Park would present to any group of humans

Transported to it unprepared from anywhere,

Any century before the past one or one and a half.

People, kids, and dogs they could handle,

Although the variety of dogs and the outfits

On everyone might have given them pause.

But then there'd be the glistening polycarbonate

Towers and slides of the playground, the bicycles

Whizzing along the paths at speeds that match

Horses, none of which are anywhere in sight,

The bizarre pillars of lamps and telephone poles

Linked by wires, the acres of elephant-hide

Grey parking lots, and the strange sculptures

Of the cars there parked, and that’s the tranquil part.

The cars open like carriages and move by themselves,

Dozens, hundreds, even thousands of them,

Gleaming, rumbling, hissing, blinking lights

Stream at speeds no humans ever saw 

Any being or object move before, anywhere,

Rushing within arm’s length of each other

And of pedestrians, and of the whizzing bikes.

Overhead the skies are crossed by omens,

Roaring daylight comets trailing white.

It wouldn’t matter if you were Benjamin Franklin

Himself come back to life, this violent scene

Would give you one hell of an initial fright.

And yet, this is ordinary, and made by us,

And although we continue to domesticate

Ourselves and adapt to the machinery, it’s not

The case that we’ve had time to evolve much.

This is, for now, just ordinary human life.

But look how much larger and faster, how much

More powerful and more precise are the products

Of our collective bodies than our bodies themselves.

Consider this as you sit, small person, in the shade

Or stroll over to get into your thoughtful car.

As this future could not have belonged 

To our past, the next future will not be ours.

Exoskeletons can only grow so large.

Horse People, 10 April 2018

It must have been strange and exhilarating
For the first people who forged that bond
Between themselves and a species so unlike
And larger, and swifter, than them, not to hunt
Or to herd only for meat, although perhaps
Those things, too, at the start, but to ride,
To fuse with, to drive the world before them,
The first apes to race across open landscapes,
The first centaurs. No wonder their beliefs
And their languages remade the world,
No wonder they claimed to be all lords.
What humans could accomplish with wolves
At their side was remarkable, but with horses
Under them, they must have begun a new
Kind of delusion. They must have felt like gods.

For Azazel, 9 April 2018

One goat goes to God. The other goat goes

To the wilderness or, in later tradition, gets
Pushed over a cliff or down a rugged slope
Steep and rocky enough to break its bones.
What waits for the goat in the wilderness
Depends on one’s sect or tradition. Enoch
Had it that an angel who had taught humans
How to make the weapons of war and seduction
Was buried in the desert to be punished
And stored until the flames of Judgement.
Other traditions said it was the proud angel
Who would not bow to Adam, the new lord
Of lower creation. Traditions, of course,
With their tales, art, and morals, are part
Of human culture, and so it seems apt
And fascinating that culture itself could encode
This distrust of an angel of culture, of war
And cosmetic technology, blamed for violence,
Sin, and sex, banished to the wilderness,
The recipient of punishment and goats
Sacrificed in the name of purifying sinners
Who lust after and deploy technologies
To kill who they want to kill, get what they want,
Fuck who they want to fuck. It’s a kind
Of ritual apoptosis, a kind of built-in strigil
By which culture could scrape off excess
Culture from human behavior, scrape the wax,
Clean its own palimpsest, send the excess
To itself where it most definitely was not,
To the absence of culture that is death or
The wilderness, Azazel: proper name, false address.

Oil, Blood, Water

Electricity whisked through copper loops
And insulated lines, a coursing stasis,
The only kind. Black sawdust sifted
As thoughts gnawed through the iron mind.
Three thousand years ago in the hills,
A pastoralist people attributed magical
Healing and cleansing power to blood, oil,
And water. Why? More surging current,
More iron filings filtered down. The oil
Was likely always vegetable, in which case
Notice the triad of essential fluids, the types,
Animal, vegetable, and mineral. The smith
Spoke, sotto voce, to the devil as to himself.
There are two kinds of magic, he hissed.
The sort I practice, with your help, sir,
The sort that makes for tools and weapons
Because it works. Then there’s the cultic
Sort that’s hopeless and makes no sense
And shouldn’t be valued at all, but appeals
To some mysterious need that tools
And weapons don’t fulfill. The devil hummed,
Happily. The electricity was his, as had been
The kiln fires in those villages of believers
In oil, blood, and water, three thousand years
Before. He knew what the smith could only
Bargain for. The second magic’s meant for itself,
My metaphorical friend. It wasn’t meant for you.