Five

We haven't, either one of us,
Ever reached quite this far before.
We hadn't failed. We just hadn't
Had each other, all hands on deck.

Now we do. Who knows what we'll do?
There's a secret word kept hidden
Behind the words everyone knows.
Your name to me. My name to you.

The Horoscope for Eighteen January, Twenty Fourteen

I have moments when I feel I can't survive
The fierce pleasure of being alive. Nor will I.
That's when life arrives peppered with being
Alive. Peppered steak, pepperjack cheese, peppery
Cabernet. Life is a cabaret old chum! Come
Taste the way plays play! You listen and say
What is it? I will say the rain. No mill necessary
To grind here. The flavor's mad sufficient
Unto the hour. My wife, my spouse, makes me
A being for whom life's worth living, a writer
For whom life's worth writing, a stuttering
Dream, a rain-soaked mystery in red rock desert.

V Is for Victory

The problem with heaven is there's never
Any better way to travel. In fact,
One must take account not only of vexed
Numbers of spots revealed by tumbling dice,

But also of the particular dice
On which those spots appear. "Particular,"
There's a word confuses the world, troubles
The otherwise immaterial waves,

Whose violet and indigo luster fades,
Upon measurement, into vees of geese,
Flotillas of scintillating breezes,
Each one highly particular and, and,

Dammit, endlessly indivisible!
We envy aviators' delusions.

Fluffy Puhsketti for Tiny Tess the Plastic Deer

I'll take all the time I need. I'm free
When I know I'm free. Any other
Definition of freedom seals me

In a need to do well urgently.
Urgency is the builder of walls
The Lord of the House of Dust, false friend

To any lover or brother caught
In the net of lordly urgency.
I'm free because I happen to be.


My daughter, feeling a bit left out
By Papa loving Mama, Mama
Loving Papa in morning sunlight,

Entertains herself with a toy deer
At the massive stone dining table,
Feeding it a large bowl of necklace.

In time, her characterization
Of the deer as Tess, messy eater
Of the giant sparkling bowl of food


Cooked by imagination's author,
Metaphor, and envisioned as loops
Of fluffy spaghetti noodles, yum,

Is sufficient to distract Sukha
From the anxiety created
By parents doting on each other

But not on her. And then, suddenly,
So no one, least of all she, can see,
She feels light and free, and she is free.

Dado

Press him to deal with his humanity,

How we coerce each other to compel
The flesh to keep breathing a few more years,
For which success we claim we saved a life.
He is cynical and he is aloof,
And he believes attitude insulates
Him from the normal humiliation
Of humble animal behaviors shared
With all the dullest humans ever were.
He must confront his commonness squarely.

Oh damn! Damn him! Damn us! Oh he's lost it again.
What was that memory, that memory
He had of him apart from us, apart
From the etymology of dado,

Much ado about die? You wouldn't think
A word could be so evasive for so long.
If you're going to get mad, maybe we
Should reconsider admitting members
To the new dictionary who are not
Pure of descent, pure of heart and argot.

An Ordeal of Change

Any other kind? I suppose
An ordeal of slow change
Might seem like an ordeal
Of no change, but no. No

No-change ordeals occur.
To occur is, well, you know.
But I'm not sure we're dreaming
The same kind of ordeal.

There's an unsealed half-tar,
Half-gravel road looping away
In front of me as I wince
Through this latest ordeal

Of fifty years and change.
It looks like a long line
Of power lines viewed by a bird
On the wires, but it's grounded

In sandy loess and snow blown
Over black basalt and freckled
With the usual true juniper trees.
This is Utah, after all. Change. Heh.

Flowers of Zion

"The world a hunting is"

From such heights as Kevin Young would know,
I watch the desert spring gather force.
What pressure the liquid world's under.
What happened to the wind with that name
Young Zapruder couldn't remember?
Katabatic? Skeletal? Pleasant?
Never mind. The time is never time
In the minds of sage philosophers,
New age gurus and cosmologists.

You don't go in for guru-ing if,
Like a squirrel, you pick fruits in the green
Garden of earthly delights, nearly dead
All the time. Man down. Man going on.
One giant leap for mankind. Antsy
As jam sandwiches at a picnic,
We writhe. The moon will not be our moon
Until the poets have been allowed
To wander seas of tranquility

And produce names no astronomer
Would have found suitably celestial.
Then, at long last, we will have something
New to forgive and apostrophize:
The virtues, their images destroyed.
Helene Johnson, where her gnarled tree stood,
Welcomed the wet, weeds, and wildflowers,
And why not, while the earth remained warm,
The soil still vowing its eager vows?