The Wonders of Information and Oddities of Existence, Winderland Lane, Utah, 30 September 2016

I waited by my devices for a message to come through I knew
Was never coming through. I was determined not to miss it
Anyway. The day refused to even pause for me. The lights
Shifted their positions continuously. A different message
Than the one I waited for, have been waiting for so long,
Arrived in the form of an uploaded photograph of a painting.
A neighbor had seen it in a gallery down the road and thought
It looked remarkably like my daughter. I agreed and studied it
As I sat in the shade nursing my bemusement at coincidence.
The afternoon shrugged its sunny shoulders. Could be. Could be.

Broken Ribs, St. George, Utah, 29 September 2016

I held my breath. I stayed behind a desk.
I did not offer anyone the information that would give me away.
When the morning brought a little rain,
I did not turn my head to my window,
Much less walk back out to my parked car
To roll up its windows. Let it get wet. In the afternoon
I attempted to make my methodical departure
Look less like strain, pain, or incapacity,
More like solemn dignity. I waited a long while
Near a green shade on a patch of gravel,
Considering what advice I would give
To myself thus immobilized and sipping
Small sips of warm air with the sun on my neck.
Take a breath. Not too deep. Not too shallow. Take a breath.
Everything we know comes true, the way we go.
Everything we know true comes true, and away we go.
I eased into my seatbelt, winced, and drove slowly home.

Pine Valley Mountain, Utah, 28 September 2016

The time came when we began to realize rules were not the rule.
Rules were little intricate homes and stadia we built inside the rule.
Our minuscule adventure of living and planning, judging and deciding,
Crying or crowing about our random results would be over soon,
Whereas we preferred to survey the immediate landscape, touch hands,
And think that the years were not behind us but hazy and marvelous
As mountains, still to be lived. A saddle of red sandstone sagged
From that perspective like a half-fallen drapery from a pale marble sculpture,
A shawl from the shoulders of a young person proud of bare shoulders,
Revealing the greyish-green mass of the laccolith beyond that rested
Death's weary head on the neck of that airy maiden. Children
Got out of a navy-blue minivan in the foreground with their mother
Who read the brass plaque affixed to the settler's homestead. Did they live
And die here? Yes, they did. It's so small. It's so small. It's so small. How
Did they all fit? Things were harder then, honey. Be grateful. Can we go?
Mom? Mom? Can I sit in the front seat this time? It's still not unlocked.
You have to sit in the back. You're too small. It's not safe. That's the rule.

How to Greet a Ghost, Zion, Utah, 27 September 2016

I tried out every trick I knew to help him, white-hair haloed
Gentleman who spoke elegantly in the classics I couldn't read.
I could hear in the very gentleness of his dwindling garden of words
What was extinguishing the fading remainder of him. Mnemosyne.
So like her to whisper intimately in the poet's ear, I'm leaving.
He stood and swayed among the invasive trees, smiling faintly.
I tried. I said what I could: Greetings, you who suffered the painful thing;
You have never endured this before. I cannot say I have either.
I would speak to you in perfect hexameters,
But I have to tell you, Orpheus can't help us.
See that cottonwood beside the white rock down in the meadow?
Don't linger there. You'll forget everything then, and be like all the rest
Of the universes that flowered, considered themselves, and left.
Go the other way. Tell the guardians you're thirsty, a child of the night,
The gods, the stars. All you have to do, Merwin, is remember this.

Sandy Wash, Snow Canyon, Utah, 26 September 2016

It had begun to unnerve me, the way the nonhuman
World had, for nearly a fortnight now, kept beckoning
With a voluptuous calm easily mistaken for kindness,
While my brain raced with the metropolitan traffic
Of fender-bending social contending for righteous conversation.
The sand in the wash, scrawled by the relentlessness of ants,
Should not have inspired any thoughts of comfort in me,
But it did. What was the interior theater doing that it should
Want to embrace the play of a characterless world?
I thought of the urns of my mother and father, my late wife
And unborn daughters, ash finer than the sand or the pumice
Drifting down wash from the sumptuous, careless black cubes spilled
Across the cracked cliffs. In what sense had they returned
To the world in which all thoughts have first to disintegrate?
We only return by evaporating, evanescing, not being,
Which is like saying the day only returns by its sunset.
The stars, by the way, were lyric this morning before dawn,
The crescent moon slender enough not to outshine them,
My one living daughter bright enough to pick out the constellations
Pointed out to her, Orion and Draco, then return to the house,
Demand paper, draw the hunter and dragon: "I moved the stars
Closer together, so they could make a scene." Drama
Permeated the pencilled standoff, and somehow she had drawn,
Without knowing the story, Saint George and the Dragon,
Tarhunt and Illuyanka all over again. Later, where the lava
Stretched, fire exhausted on the all-absorbing sand, I thought
And wished I hadn't thought, that maybe the world thinks something
Other than us but through us, something calling us, understand.

Trugeranos, After Smith Mesa, 25 September 2016

We shuffled around in the red sand, looking for debitage,

The chert and obsidian flakes among the piñon and juniper

And old hearths, stray beer tabs, some broken glass and shotgun shells,

Horse dung moldering under some trees, cow patties under others,

The shoulder spine of a long-dead doe, rather small to have been shot.

Across the canyon, a sheep trailer and a cowboy cabin, more mesa,

And beyond that, Hurricane Mesa with its sixty-year old supersonic

Flying monkey rocket sled launch testing site, now privately owned.

Keep Out. I could not for the life of me figure out the distortions

In the doe's twisted fragment of spine that made her bones monstrous

To me as mine would be to anyone other who found them this way,

In the detritus of passing strategies. Her back looked like a fanged tail,

A tiny dragonling. Remember how the Greeks repaid the Seleucid king

For his marvelous gift of real tigers by returning him the nonexistent,

Nonsense monster, the trugeranos? The world is all one 

Such a monster to me, such a monster to the world. Poor doe.

God Art, Red Cliffs, 24 September 2016

"Everything is stretched," went one fragmentary inscription.

I'm sure the poet behind it felt it. In the morning, before dawn,

I entertained the notion that art is a constrained, infallible deity,

Capable of wringing the most creativity possible from each of us,

Absolutely determined to do so, but no more. Art thus orchestrates

Each existence, portioning out whatever amounts of success and suffering

Maximize our creative output. When humans, say, Rimbaud, Plath,

Yield the most from sensing and approaching an early doom, 

Doom them. If plaudits or a long life could create more, better,

Give them that. Poverty to those who make the most of it.

Neither hesitate to goad Monet with a lottery prize if that's the ticket,

Nor ignore the mediocre. Art does what it can to get what it can

From us. Only once it's got as much as we've got to give does it get

Indifferent, letting a Wordsworth dawdle on to nothing, and who cared?

In a tiny circle of ruined Mormon settler houses cut from ancient sandstone

Compressed of more ancient dunes and recently begun to be blown back

To sand again from crumbling surfaces, I sat and watched the desert light

Stretch like a great, tawny saber-toothed cat, contented until it was extinct,

And then I drove home in the dark, unaccompanied, so I wished to think.