Devendra Cloth, Zion, Hurricane, 31 October 2016

Dreamed terror of a rough piece of cloth that seemed
To be moving around my head in the dark. Was it in my head or
Outside my head? Was it being dragged along over the bed,
Someone dragging it, or was it dragging itself through my skull?
Its name was devendra cloth, that I knew, horrible, but that was all.
The emotions we feel in our dreams are too strong for the things we dream.
I think the things we dream produce no emotions themselves at all.
The gusts of emotion coursing down through the canyons' deep sleep
Stir up our dreams, whirling detached, scattered memories around
The way winds whip up piles of fallen leaves off the ground.
We wouldn't say leaves created the wind. We wouldn't snatch at them to read.

The World Goes On Beginning, Zion, 30 October 2016

God made me, having nothing more to do, and proved
There was nothing he could not make, if I were a thing he could.
Knowing that much, I had lived my waking life accordingly:
I had tracked down, so far as was possible for me, relations
Between the manifold aspects of my experience. I had
Described my universe as it was becoming, including,
So far as my shame and selfish self-regard allowed,
Its little sordid bits. I had not lied about lying was my proudest lie.
To the extent I had been honest I was ready to die.
In all this, I was accurate. Distressingly. That's why.

Time Was When Hermitage, Zion, 29 October 2016

My "resistance to systems (i.e. genre)" had fled into the "scare quotes

Around the blurb thought might dull their prismatic luminescence,

Their proof of parataxis's poiesis." I didn't write that, of course.

I sat in a pine chair carved with a chainsaw to look like it held the sun

And read through the dreams of Ives and her hermit, Nancy.

We can't all be the final girl, can't all be brave, can't all be cited or lauded

For choosing to publish our self-documented isolation, but we can

Ask as well, "Is it possible we somehow die for a time, a year,

A month, a day, without realizing this, then awake to find ourselves,

Which is to say 'someone,' present again, attentive, expectant, apologetic 

Even?" We can spend a final weekend, perhaps before or after that possibility,

With a daughter home sick watching Bambi and other lonely fare

And consider ourselves hermit, or what a hermit is today. Yesterday,

Shortly before I was born, Beth Gleick wrote Time Is When.

By the time I was in my mid-fifties, her sly son had quoted her,

Calling her a children's book. That's all I have time to report for now.

Right It Like Disaster, Adams House, Utah, 28 October 2016

It cheered him up to learn that swifts stayed
Most of their lives, ten months at a time, in the air.
He didn't have enough love to write fifteen drafts of losses
Suspended in eye-blue air, trying to raise art from despair.
His life had been more of a rusted canoe wobbling on pond chop
Than a sculpted arabesque of cloud-high devotion landing only to nest.
Nevertheless, he savored the notion of flight unsupported
By regular rest, given how only the air itself had given him
Much understanding or hope of understanding things.
The ideas he'd met had rarely been from bodies when he met them.
Were it not for books, engines, machines, devices with tuners, with screens,
He might have never gotten to know much of anyone or anything.
Now, he thought, "if I haven't seen as much, touched as much,
Been told by anyone elevated how well I elevated them--
If I've had less to lose on the one hand for having had to need a hand
Now and then, then, on the other hand, I could still dream upwards and sink
Down toward blank heaven's reflections with the best of them."
He knew it made no sense to think like this, but what sort of effort-full thing
Hangs suspended, spinning and sleeping and thinking while rowing its wings?
Apparently a small and selfishly falling, difficult-to-notice thing.
As he neared a stone home on the shore, no one home except air,
He could feel himself sinking and lurched, tipping over and over again.

Naal, Near Virgin, Utah, 27 October 2016

Reading a translation of a fifteen-hundred year old monk's
Grandly pious and politically shrewd account of wandering, I saw
There are gods of the mountains in the mind that imagines.
There are neither gods nor mountains outside of imagination,
Nor imagination outside of any mind at all, although imagination,
Like its gods and mountains, also has no need of any one mind at all.
These were the sorts of thoughts imagination provided a mind
It inhabited that happened to know, waiting for the local shadows
Of the mountains and their gods to finally fall, these rivulets of sand
Between exposed roots of the half-dead cottonwood trees were called
By some forms of thinking a dry wash, with water somewhere below,
By some a wadi, and by others, in other scriptures, a naal.
And the good of all this translating, reading, and imagining was what
In a world where the universe kept nonexistence to itself,
Where water fell a killer flood of tomorrow's empty wash,
So similar to another imagination as to seem unchanged,
When water came with sand and logs and tumbled
Stones when water fell at all.

Predawn Dream, 62 Winderland Lane, 26 October 2016

So long as anything's happening, there's always more,
And only so long as anything's happening is there anything at all.
The most miraculous act of faith of any beast
Is the swooning into sleep, inviting nothing in
For a temporary visit at the risk that nothing will have ever been
And nothing forever again. Sometimes I believe
Dreams exist to express the need of the beast
To reassure itself it's only sleeping
And the universe has yet to cease.

Mnesikakia, Daimonion, Zion, 25 October 2016

When I should have been picking my spot and surrendering

Payment of the whole world to the whole world, instead

I hibernated at home in bed, refusing to take responsibility 

For any sort of truth at all, whether it was the memory of old crimes,

The inner communion with the complex parasitical divinity, my demon,

Or the language that makes it certain that the math corresponds:

Beyond the event horizon the cosmos looks gorgeous, and I

Like any I, like the I itself, which had a first instance as the corruption 

Of something else and will have a last instance just as something else 

Corrupts it in turn, can no more escape the grim destiny of the singularity 

I can no more avoid than I can avoid tomorrow, which can only 

Avoid me by eliminating me and everything with me, even tomorrow, even I.