Grown Up

When I was a boy
And my mother
Ruled the airwaves
With absolute prohibition

Against what we called
Rock and roll
And she called, so
Anachronistically,

"That jazzy music,"
As in, "Turn off
That jazzy music, now!"
My sibs and I

Convinced her
That country music
Was close kin to gospel,
Inbred even,

And then turned on
The poppiest, peppiest
Country radio we could find,
Loud as the knob would allow.

Inevitably, some tune
Would come on too heavy
In its backbeat, too raunchy
In its lyrics to pass

My mother's righteous ear
Unnoticed, and we'd rush
To either defend the song
("It's only country!")

Or, when in doubt
Ourselves, turn it down.
One song, however,
Not country at all,

Just seventies pop
And smarmily racy,
Never registered with her
No matter how loud.

It was a stupid song,
One even we kids didn't like,
Much less understand,
Nonetheless it was safe

And we sang, brazenly
Off-key, the chorus,
"Sky-rockets in flight!
Afternoon delight!"

I think of that silly bad song
Today, on a sunny afternoon,
When a spring wind puffs
White bed curtains. How true.

Mind, Body, and Papa

Big windy day in the valley,
The Ides of March are hard upon us,
And everything and nothing
Hang in the balance, as always.

The body wishes to complain,
To enumerate aches and pains,
To worry about its demise
Or at least why it's not sleeping well.

The candle flame in the brain
Wants peace and quiet, wants
To observe without distractions
The windy day around it.

Neither can have what either
One wants. So they get
What they did not ask for,
Including better than deserved.

By late afternoon, the body
Hurts even more than before,
The candle flame gutters, confused
By the demands of the hour.

But the day itself has turned
Oddly marvelous,
The wind more amusing,
The warmth more supportive.

The body convinces the mind
To look beyond the body
At least as far as family,
And as a reward, both get to see

Sequoia teaching herself
To sip water from a straw
After much trial and error
Near sunset, in awe.

Peach Blossom Spring

I

A fly, a dog, a breeze in the straw
That used to be green lawn

A bird, a chime, a lonesome pause
On the bare porch of what was

A beer, a book, a folding chair
Beside the sagging wooden stairs

Warped in all weather, wet and fair
To measure time from here to there

A wind that blows and goes again
A truck that roars around a bend

Of the long, dirt roads 
That map the bottom
Of this valley of homes 
Mostly emptied of those 
That bought them

II

A year ago,
This guy I know
Claims he wrote
A poem

About the delights
And tricky life
Of the mind
Viewed in its own light.

A year ago,
He addressed the poem
To a three-month old,
As if to show

He wasn't just caught
In his own thoughts,
Self-centered and distraught,
When he ought

To be thinking of others--
His wife, his daughter,
His by-then mindless mother,
His long-lost sisters and brothers.

I think he was wrong.
He knew all along
His own mind belonged
To the worlds of the gone

And therefore always near,
Not the world that appears
To be here,
However unclear.

Who can forgive
The mind's urge to relive
What cannot be sieved
For good and all from it?

Philosophy was so
Last year, so long ago.
The three-month old
Ephebe has grown,

Now a fifteen-month old child,
Who lisps in accents  mild
And acts a little more wild
When she most sweetly smiles.

III

We almost forget
Before we remember
When we're telling stories

To ourselves
To make others remember
That the core

Of our creation
Remains a kind of division
Between water, air, and fear

The creatures of the water
Swam first
And will last longer

But are not us nor ours
To fiddle with, no matter
How we devour them

And the creatures of fear
Are not ours either
But are us exactly, in our fevers

While the creatures that please,
Stay strange, let us breathe
Are the trees

They anchored the garden
They served as God's wardens
We can't live without them

And yet they stay rooted, apart,
Lives far from ours, weird, dark
Innumerable, vulnerable from the start

Humbaba's children, children's homes
Bones of our dreams, dreams of our bones 
Yggdrasil, mind, what we were once we're grown

Slide

Hours can turn
On no more
Than pain, down

Deep in bone,
Worn canyons.
Coyote,

The old guy,
Caught on rocks,
Squirms and howls

Quavering
Echoes torn
From falling

Boulders dropped
On his paws
In the dark

Narrow slots
Where shadows
Come to feed.

Bend toward the Devil

The tourists are back on the River,
Another year later, another preacher
Now apologizing for a false prediction
Of the Apocalypse last season,

Other preachers still gearing up
For the end of the world this season,
Presidential campaigns everywhere,
Protests and unrest per usual

Not having deterred these rafters
Floating the rapids around the bend,
Colorfully dressed and shouting,
Waving paddles and beers at doom.

Even one of our more apocalyptic
Neighbors left the valley just last week
For California and a new beginning,
Giving away her emergency rations,

One more paradox exported from Utah,
Home of downwinders and tons
Of hoarded foods in latter-day basements,
Also wonderland of frivolous adventures,

Home for now to me and mine
As I come back from town,
Tootling along the River Road
With groceries in the back,

Full of my own sagacity,
Knowing the world never ends,
Even though I am too stupid
To buy the organic brand of chicken.

I pull over for a moment to stand
A minute in the sand contemplating
The wisdom of me and the rafters,
The foolishness of preachers,

Forgetting the groceries in my genius
As a passage from Mr. Gopnik's
Latest book review floats into mind
And cheering rafters spin in rapids.

"Manichaeanism" he writes,
"Is the natural religion of mankind
And all faiths bend toward the Devil,
To make sense of God's furious impotence."

He further opines that this is why
The hard, fanatic faiths flourish
While the soft, mystical systems
End up buried in the hot sand. Wise.

Standing in the hot sand myself,
I consider the durability of rafters
And preachers and good times
And dark prophecies, sempiternal,

Until I recall the transience of me
And my unrefrigerated groceries.
The death of my civilization
Will not precede me.

Life in the Recent Past

I know this is not now,
But a mostly helpful
Model made by the brain
That creates me daily,
A full world to live in,
A fair facsimile,

Fed by the richer world
That I will never know,
Never be. Yesterday,
Sequoia played bongos
With me in the front room,
On empty plastic cups,

She'd dragged from recycling--
Old yogurt containers
And butter tubs--pounding
Away, dull hollow thumps,
Great fun for both of us.
Today, recycling's done,

Bags of glass and plastic,
Stacks of cardboard loaded
In the back of the truck.
I sit out in the sun
Trying to be my life
Piling up, spilling out

Of the world that I am,
Recycled container,
Smelly remnants, red words
Slapped on to label things
Soon to be melted down
Again by the hot days,

Already here and gone,
What is because it was,
And yet will never be,
Life made oil made cup held
Words held oil ran out got tossed
Made waste made drum toy fun.

The Children of Homs

"Cooperation is murder."

Today in the news of blood
And chumminess, two stories
Collide, well-documented, glorious.

Experiments with children,
Chimpanzees and monkeys illustrate
How uniquely humans cooperate.

Kids encourage each other,
Share symbolic prizes, accumulate
Strategies, and accelerate,

While monkeys and apes compete
Solo for actual food they snatch
From each other, hoarding scraps.

Wonderful. We're unique,
We instinctively coordinate
Where other primates subordinate.

And then, swipe the screen, change
The channel, turn the printed page.
In Syria, another outrage,

Security forces decimate
The rebellious town of Homs
Filling the streets with bones.

Mutilated bodies rot
In sewage-filled rooms
Where various tortures were filmed.

The highly synchronized
Cooperation of armies and police
Secure the citizenry, piece by piece.

Cooperating people founded
The civilization, cooperating people
Defended it against evil.

Cooperating people invented guns
For cooperating people to shoot
At cooperators in hot pursuit.

Cooperation created tools
For more cooperation--presses,
Radios, TVs, web addresses.

Cooperating people extracted
False confessions from former
Cooperators, teams of traitors.

And so on, and so on,
And vengeance to come, asking
Isn't this fun? Who lost? Who won?

Hugs to the winners already hugging
Each other, hugs all around!
Scattered dead ferment the ground.