Tempest in a Cafe, Hurricane, Utah, 7 January 2019

Today the weird, grey beauty of a wintry, wet desert,
Of bare, dark boulders and of scrubby, drab vegetation
Glistening with rain. Sit inside with a teacup
And a view from the cafe and consider it,
Among a couple dozen strangers with their own
Sandwiches, soups, and cups. “All they do is lovely,
And tea leaves circle in their cups like hawks
Above the valley.” Hawk in the actual valley below us,
Gliding down past the black lava rocks, the shuttered,
Sulfuric hot springs, the creosote and rabbit brush,
Vanishing grey and glistening with rain.

When Anstapa Banhus Went Searching for an Old Friend and Found Only an Obituary, 6 January 2019

Everyone gets a number, from zero
To a hundred and twenty, although few
Get anything over ninety. My late wife, Paula,
Got 45. My good friend James recently drew 53.
One grandfather was handed 85, the other 44.
My father ended up with 67, mother 84.
I will not get anything lower than 56, for sure.
Jeanne Calment got 122, although she’s viewed
With some suspicion. Maybe she drew 99.
Not everyone gets a number, actually. Numbers
Are fantasies, carefully monitored, liberally strewn
About, like seeds, but really only faeries
That happen to appear to inhere in everything.
Still, since we’re counting, since we’ve been
Counting for countable centuries, admit we’ve learned
That the numbers we used to favor for heroes
And ancestors, numbers like 900 or more,
Weren’t ever really meant for us. If we want
Bigger numbers, we need smaller units,
Littler divisions, arbitrary as months or weeks,
Oscilatory as moons or days, embodied
As moments or breaths. You can get a billion
Or two heartbeats, maybe three, not a great feat.
The more you get, of course, the less you might
Get yet, and so you look back, in the very idea
Of you that you are a you, a body of ideas,
An idea of a body, in celebration and mourning
Of those you knew like you who got all already
That they’ll ever get and are gone as you keep on.
You’ll get there. You’ll get there. You’ll get one
When you become one, nothing more than story
And number, then, having escaped all counting,
All the human mania for social details. And then,
There is love as well, the temporal doubleness
Of all experience, whose march is for desolation.
There is love, old friend. Go ahead, take a number.

The Pole of Inaccessibility, Saint George, Utah, 5 January 2019

None of my dreams are going well.
They wake me repeatedly in disgust, dread,
Or alarm. Half of the time they end when
I say to them, during them, “this dream is
Gross, is going nowhere, is frustrating me.”
I’m tired of being reminded dreams are
Necessary and good for me. As the pole
Of inaccessibility is to the true North Pole,
An absurd and contested construct,
A derivation of an invisible point on the ice,
Both the measurement and the ice ever-shifting
Alike, the supposed place hovering in the air
Where the Arctic is precisely farthest from
Any nearest point of land, so is nightmare
To any goal, any true dream of doing anything.
It’s romantic and excitingly frightening
To ponder and think of visiting, but it’s nothing
Much, something our brains gin up to scare
The rest of the body with, to race the pulse.
And yet, the two become confused. Explorers,
Bored with other ultimate poles, daydream
Of reaching the pole of inaccessibility, while I
Daydream of writing the ultimate description
Of the weird and vicious universe of sleep.

Housing in Saint George, Utah, 4 January 2019

I had a high apartment with high windows
Halfway up a modest sandstone ridge.
The town around was mostly brown suburban
Housing, but because I was on the sixth floor
And my windows were so tall, I saw over
All those roofs and ruses, out to the panoramic
Cliffs surrounding us, from Pine Valley Mountajn
To Black Ridge, the Kolob Terrace, and Zion,
With still four-fifths of my window entirely sky
And usually blue. I was happy with this view,
Little animal, little compendium of animals
And words and animalcules that we are here
Calling, for convenience, me. I was happy, me.

Overlook That I Overlooked Before, Saint George, Utah, 3 January 2019

“The beauty of the wild irises, alas,

cannot guard against misfortune.”

Beauty remained unhinged from good or evil

And independent from grace or misfortune.

Humans continued to instruct each other

To be appreciative, to be grateful, to savor,

Even as humans continued to coordinate,

To form faithfully cooperating, loving teams,

The better to compete against other teams

The better to take over the untakeable world.

And beauty remained. The wonder of this

Unlovely world is how lovely this world is.

But beauty was never meant for us. Beauty

Was incapable of being meant before us. 

Meaning and the assignment of meaning, 

The discovery and application of meaning

For all phenomena, was our invention. Being

Grateful or feeling resentful that beauty

Remained a part of our experience, however,

Remained irrelevant. And yet. Beauty remained.

The List of Mines, Old Spanish Trail Highway, 2 January 2019

The mines were home to demons, angels,
And memories, much the same, each a gap
In the side of the soil, the earth extracted.
Here was the mine of being like a god. There
The mine of crowns. The mine of shrines,
Itself one, beside the mines of shepherding,
Priests, thrones, nobility, truth, mere wealth.
The great mines descending and ascending,
The mines of eunuchs and entertainers,
The mines of battle standards, weapons,
The mines of bargaining, sex, prostitution,
The mines of law, libel, fear, and lamentation.
The mines of the hero, undaunted by danger,
Including the danger of mines that eat heroes.
The mines of scribes, of crafts, of arts,
Of weariness, peace, and holy purification.
The mines of many forgotten instruments
Still playing sweetly inside them, gold, silver.
The mines of the troubled heart, of the floods.
The mines of the destruction of empires.
The mines of the destruction of mines.
The mines of nothing much or nothing.
The mines of minds. The mines of mine.

The Forest of Ten Trillion Pines, Near Death Valley, New Year’s Day, 2019

“Against my better judgment, I sought out
The hut of a poet.” No love lost between
My better judgment and me. A clear sky,
To be sure, and above freezing, to be sure,
But not by much, and stiff winds off the cliffs
Gusting to seek out every weakened seam.
Do you know what a pale blue sky and blood
Moons have in common? Air’s theft of blue
Wavelengths from sunlight, dividing white
Into robin’s egg and darkly bruised orange.
Pale blue now and pumpkin blood coming.
Look around. Not a tree to be found. Last
Afternoon of the previous calendar year
Old mine shafts in dry mountains rang out
Loud and clear with silence. Not a bird
To be heard once engines stopped purring.
“It goes in a mile, straight, then up a flight,
Then up another flight, then down in three
Directions, like steps. Fifteen miles of shafts
In all. My buddy and I explored it with GPS.
Dangerous though. No animals in it. Never
Saw a single bat. Well, at the very end, when
It opens into the sun again, you run into rats.
Perfect for packrats. They don’t like seeing
You coming up at them out of the black. I
Don’t like seeing them. But they avoid me
As I squeeze past them, mostly. Mostly,
They don’t want you running into them.”
Back up into the brilliant (why brilliant?) blue.
In the desert, in the mine, in the deep shafts,
In the packrat middens, shines, shines and is
Everything, the forest of ten trillion pines.