For Sarah, on St. Valentine's Day

Only now do I begin
To understand the concept
Of a true muse. She makes you

Wander, most often places

You had not yet wished to go.
She makes you question, yourself,
Why you had not questioned you.

She makes you work to create
What you had not intended,
Love what you had not known, go

Down into the depths of loss,

Old, nostalgic grief. Lose it.
She should not always be soft,
Who's always true. She loves you.

No One Ever Saved a Life

A life can never be saved,
But a death can be postponed.
Where's the dishonor in that?
Why hype it as salvation?
The quality of mercy
Is strained but not without grace.
More life to those who want more.

Social Graces

It's better to make mistakes
Than to listen too closely,
Articulate carefully
Or educate too wisely.
Which is handy, since mistakes
Come easily, perfection
Being impossible. Good,

I will make do with better
And forgo best that earns worse.
The old story of the fox
Declaring unreachable
Grapes sour was cruel to foxes.
The grapes, poor vintage, declared
Themselves sour and so saved face.

Time Licks All Wounds

I come around a corner of the road
That winds through the Colorado's canyons,
The sort of mostly empty, scenic route
One can drive on a February day
With the red cliffs and grey skies to oneself,

And I'm brought up short by a line of cars
On a hairpin curve behind flashing lights.
I park and wait. More enterprising men
Get out of their trucks and walk to the front
To ask the police what happened. Not me.

I prefer not to start conversations
With uniformed men who wear guns to work,
Especially not near blue and red lights.
I sit and wonder how bad the wreck was
Too far up ahead for my line of sight.

I'm in no hurry. I'm driving alone.
Still, I'm eager to ask the ones who asked
What, if anything, they found out. Not much
Except the slightly disappointing news
That it's a spilled load of hay blocks the road,

Which is both relief and anti-climax,
Not to mention curiously rustic.
So we wait as hay gets cleared off the road
And my mind rummages through its own past
For prior accidents and near misses,

The car that clipped me as a teen driver,
The nasty thwack at an intersection,
The fender-bender as a passenger
In the front seat of a too-cautious friend,
The heart-pausing slide off ice into snow,

The truckload of vegetables overturned
At twilight in the Nevada desert,
The white-tailed doe that jumped into the road
And frightened me badly in Wyoming,
The moose missed on the Yukon logging road,

The dog that ran out in Namibia
In the doggy belief I would speed up,
Then  got tangled in a tire when I braked
Hard, out of panic, trying to miss it.
In my rear view I saw it limp away.

What Just Happened?

As it was now and ever shall have been,
I used to think that I was almost here,

When there never was any here wasn't
Already passed over me there. Moses

Knew what I was finding out, what he spent 
His own forty years finding out himself.

The promised land would always be there, just not
Quite here. I got all the time in the world.

The Blue Light

Every moment dug a well
By the shore of the white lake.
The man who noticed this fell
Through his own dream by mistake.

"It's hard to predict what's passed,"
He thought, as he caught the light
From yesterday, falling fast,
Outlining permanent night.

"Never more is, only was,
Always was, as this blue spark,
This well, this memory does
Itself done down in the dark."

Haunted Orem

The skateboarders are out again
Under the full moon at midnight
The trio of long boarders are out
In the Hampton Inn parking lot
Under the full moon at midnight

They were out there last night
Turning and weaving in the arc lights
They were almost soundless almost
Ghosts in their nondescript hoodies
Flipping and sticking their landings

They will be there every last night 
That I ever remember their shadows
Riding shadows over shadows over
The brilliant grey light of the empty
Long past abandoned parking lot