The Woods in Confidence, Utah, 7 September 2018

There is something to say here, and I wish
That I, delusion of self, could hear it
And repeat it, so that you, delusion of other,
Could hear me and repeat it. My head inclines
From a rocky perch to listen to the water.
The tiny stream runs under the trunk of the giant
Ponderosa, suspended by its spread roots
Like a gymnast or a circus acrobat, over the fall.
I have, I am, I inhabit a brain as sculpted as that
Stream and those roots but not cut out to make
Coincidental noises. To listen for meaning in them.
I incline. I am inclined to hear you, delusion,
Answering me, soothing me, the conspecific
Voice of a god, a ghost, a fairy sprite, although
You are water being pulled down, not speaking
So much as a word to me. I will understand you
Only when I’m done with dreams and with dreaming
Messages might be passing either through me or you.

Astronomical Odds, Saint George, Utah, 6 September 2018

The night watch keeps an eye on the sky.
Awareness of being one among aware beings
Is an impossibly esoteric, dangerously toxic,
Prohibitively costly, and perilously fugitive
Existence. It needs guarding while it rests,
And only one of its own can guard the rest.
The poet in the watchtower shifts from thought
To thought, wishing there were a password
One could demand of shooting stars. Wait
For it by describing the wait, over and over,
Every poem a snapshot collected for comparison
To every other poem, scanned by the seeker of pattern
Looking for that glimpse of dragon wings moving
Against the backdrop of repeated terms and rhythms.

Arbitrage of the Years, Saint George, Utah, 5 September 2018

These could be wealthy, but not the wealthiest,
Quoth the archaeologist, interviewed about a tomb.
Don’t you ever want to chuckle at the fact
That death is the greatest preserver of our lives?
We sold them dear and bought them back lightly,
To sell again as bones and treasured artifacts.
Of course, not all lives ever were thus preserved.
Many, most of our ancestors, missed the mounds
And middens to vanish in the perfect sin of life
And geology’s absolute recycling. But those
Bones, those gold leaves of metempsychosis,
Those sacrificed horses, they remained so to speak
Of relative wealth and status, of the longing
To transcend, to carry accomplishment onward.
We, who domesticated wolves and ourselves,
Have been dogs, proud of the trophies we’ve buried
To claim and offer as prizes later. Immortality
On offer, immortality, Dear, cheap immortality.

All But Touching the Hem of Night, 4 September 2018

We parse the divine. Why not? We parse
Sentences, and those too we made to remake us.
Those, too, now escape and define us. Nights,
I sometimes haul out on my balcony like an old seal,
A scarred and reproductively irrelevant seal
Not far from the many similar shadows ashore,
Hauled out on a peripheral rock. I watch the edges
Of the general bob, quieter at these hours but
Nonetheless in motion, aware and unaware.
The calm night is divine. The night is the divine,
The devas, the deevs, the devils we’ve made
Of dark and the stars. It descends like a gown,
More lovely, I suspect, than whatever corpse
It dresses. Corpus. I am an animal. I am many animals.
But I  am only one or a few awarenesses at a time,
While also host to invading hosts of ghosts, gods,
And sentence structures. Parse and parcels,
Among my thoughts, I note the lesser lights
Come from beneath that dim the distant sights.
Still over me, the night descends, of everything,
Of everything, and I can almost touch the hem.

The Difficult Done Easily, Driving Home from Vegas, 3 September 2018

I know nothing, literally, will come of this poetry,
Of any poetry, all poetry, given long enough.
At least I told the cosmos what I thought of it
Before it swallowed me back into it. Humans
Like slogans, like “speak truth to power,” but
None of us ever has very much power
And that only for a few years and mostly
Over each other. Even the terrible force a pilot
Drops in a bomb over unfortunate neighborhoods
Does not come from us, nor belong to us,
Certainly not any one of us. That is to say,
There is power in the cosmos, yes, but not
In us, and if we want to speak the truth we must
Address that power, which will swallow us,
Having generated us, as if it were so lonely
It needed tiny chattering offspring to destroy.

Sun Chair Bedroom Somewhere, 2 September 2018

The night is tired. You don’t know this, but
The night is always, has always been tired.
The stars are weary. The galaxies nod their spiral
Heavy heads, sleepy as poppies, black-eyed.
That’s exhaustion that goes by the moniker
Dark matter, and those are the stirring of many,
Many shadowy limbs restless for rest that go
By the ironic label dark energy. The whole
Mess is so worn out with its own messiness,
Longing for an all-too distant end to endlessness
That it can’t be bothered. That’s why we get
No answers when we query it, when we scan
Its scattered turbulence for anything as young
And eager to communicate as us. It’s not
That there’s nothing out there, or it’s not
Only that there’s no one. The night is tired.

Chilly Office, Saint George, Utah, 1 September 2018

I, who am known not to be in the office when
I should, have a habit of haunting workplaces
And classrooms when no one else is around,
Going back to my days in boarding school.
Another holiday weekend, and the suite
Is empty, super-cooled with no bodies inside.
What shall I do while I’m here? All the work
I can’t bear to look at when people pass by.
It’s not that I like to socialize. It’s just that I
Can’t think if someone asks me anything
And struggle to be polite when interrupted
Or even to allow the interruption. As I work,
I think of you, however, you who will never
Be able to ask me questions because I will
Not be available by the time you read this,
If you read this, whoever you are, dear
Reader who has given these silent word worms
Some of your time and mind. That makes me
Wish I could ask you something, instead.
Wouldn’t it be lovely if all books worked
Like ouija boards at Sandover, and we all
Could converse, actually converse, across
The centuries? You could ask, I could ask,
Everyone could ask and answer. Well, this will
Have to do for now. The office is cold and empty
Of you. I believe in you, but I should get back to work.