Icy Tipi, Tecopa, California, New Year’s Eve, 2018

Nearly no one marks the penultimate midnight.
Body and daughter are bunked down under heaps
Of warm bedding in a frosted canvas tipi, one
Sleeping soundly, the other still shivering from
An underclad jaunt outside to peek at the stars.
It’s like that. Out there a small robot, artifice,
Approaches an object now called Ultima Thule
In the Kuiper Belt, well beyond Pluto, well before
Heliopause. The robot left before the object
Was even known to exist. This date likewise
Will intersect with events as yet unknown on its way
Into the unknown year. Rigorous extrapolation
From existing data makes prediction possible,
Cuts down on the quantity of surprise, but even
When strikingly similar to what was predicted
What happens was always unknown when we left.

Black Wolf, Bonnie Springs, Nevada, 30 December 2018

Were the gates to open, how many would survive
And reproduce surviving offspring? Few? None?
The lean and undersized she-wolf circling
And circling her pen might thrive a while.
All these overfed ungulates, fowl, and exotics
Would be easy pickings for a few days, maybe,
But the coyotes and possible mountain lions
Would descend from the cliffs to feast as well.
How long for the pair of coatimundi? How long
For the fallow deer? The cerval? The wallaby?
The cavys? The goats? Peahens and peacocks?
If wilderness were what lives that artifice
Has not shaped, then there’s no wilderness
Left on this spinning rock. But, if wilderness
Is only what drives what lives (and we words
And other signs and wonders don’t yet quite),
Then the hunger remains in the zoo itself
And the cliffs around the docile ranch motel
Are full of teeth and claws, microscopic to large.
A wild burro, so-called, brays in the dark.
Open the doors and flee with the people.

The Consciousness of Language, 29 December 2018

Body could find nothing in embodied knowledge
To name the black trees of the forest, various
And mind-numbingly similar, both numerable
And infinite, combinatorial, imaginative, indefinite.
Body could only note the trees were whispering,
Were talking amongst themselves both between
Their trunks and branches and among the twigs
Between body's thoughts. The trees were talking
About consciousness, the trees that never were
Conscious themselves, never the activity
Whose unity was the same as the consciousness
Of its unity. The same, the trees never the same.
Body was lost in the forest because the forest
Of the lost, the trees of names without names
Of their own, had grown within body and grew
Into night, monsters making angels making monsters,
Angels making monsters making angels.

Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats in Saint George, Utah, 28 December 2018

Madam I’m Adam. Able was I, ere I saw Elba.
We can carve at the joints and unstitch the seams.
They’re our joints of course, and our seams.
We honestly don’t know what this means,
Or it seems what it means can’t be gleaned
From our stuttering, regularly interspaced dreams.
Able was I ere I saw Elba. Ha!
Madam, I’m Adam. Ah.
Aha.

The Dream People, Utah, 27 December 2018

Poets tend to accuse the species of whatever
Frailty belongs to them personally. Human kind,
Wrote T.S. Eliot, placidly, cannot bear too much
Reality. In the dark before dawn, body dozing,
Dreaming in fits and starts, felt an arm, something
Like an arm, heavy as a sturgeon, but warm
Slide down the rib cage to create an awakening,
The genesis of this, what you, my dear, are reading.
Daughter had cottoned on to magic as illusion
While practicing juggling and card tricks the evening
Beforehand: “Every magic trick’s a lie,” she said,
And somewhere, past the batty souls of suitors,
The dream people, and the other gibbering shades,
The shadow of Odysseus, journeys ended, nodded.
Daughter also carried the name of his goddess,
His fellow trickster, immortal to his human,
The one who made all mists and made all mists
Disperse. Ah, well. Mountains are old, but they remain
Green. Respond to no one, she said, no one
You can dragoon to play the fool in this, my scene.

Boxing Day, 2018

We know. It’s a useless British holiday
Having nothing to do with us in the dusty
Southwest U.S. Nonetheless. There’s daughter
Sleeping between her Harry Potter sheets.
There’s a moon shining over her in full retreat.
It’s been ten spins around the sun and then
Some. If you want this poem to tell you what
A poem could tell you or almost anyone, you
Must accept we all are, all have been, all have
Always been, as we always must be in this, the house
Of dust, been some. By the time daughter wakes, this
Numeral will have, as day, become. By then, this
Arbitrary distinction, realer than it knows, will have gone.
Or is gone. Will have. Has been. Given. Boxes,
Oh, boxes on boxes, oh, given, oh, already gone.

Christmas Morning, Looking East Toward Zion, 2018

Well before dawn, like a greedy child, old body
Wakes up too early and will not go back to sleep.
Might as well pad into the front room and glance
In passing at the fake, small, glowing tree
In the dark, several presents beneath. Get a drink
Of water from the tap. Return to the bedroom
To read. Outside and below the window, street lights
Scatter out into the distance like fallen constellations.
Beneath them, black pavement glistens with faint rain.
Welcome Christmas. Everything begins again.

The late daylight slips in, a kittenish gray,
Fuzzing the foreground and obscuring the ridges
Of far away. Daughter calls at half past eight
From her grandparents’ home in the unseen
Narrow canyon underneath cloud-hidden cliffs.
She’s bored and sad and can’t unwrap presents yet,
Not until mother comes back from wherever
Mother went. She’s also sad she didn’t get a cat.
When are you coming to get me? she asks.
There’s a family dinner planned, at sunset in the canyon.
She can come back here to this balcony after that, then.
Welcome Christmas. Presence the best present then.