A Cutting

Patience can be wistful,
Pragmatic intelligence,
Given winter's tmesis.
Tiny slices of pulses,
Hearts of house finches
Inside split-log piles
Under icicled picnic
Tables glazed solid
With frozen seeds, fit
Neatly past cracks,
Pecking bits of before
And what could be
Construed as not
After but possibly
Later, maybe later.

Ghost Desert

Today, the angels are closer,
Weightier, a blanket of wings
That never have to beat or fly
Covering lives in frozen light.

Scintillation from the hubcaps
Across dunes to the horizon,
Overwhelmingly white on white,
Floating up into pale heaven,

That's what we've got here. Inversion
Has brought the upper atmosphere,
The true desert of thin gasses
Down as a sterile reminder

To the living, complaining soul
Of the earth that every dry ounce
Of burnt-red, barren-seeming dirt
Is a luscious jungle of love

Compared to what's always up there--
Crowding angels of vacancy
Peering with their blank, saucer eyes
From their vast and abstract faces

Filled with incuriosity
Down at the crawling existence,
The near two-dimensional wars,
Of our hearts that keep on going.

"Custom Handmade Porcelain Dolls"

Litter the landscape
Around the canyons:
Courthouses, rock art,
And roadside lodges
Are haunted by them.

Lovely, painted clay
Hands, arms, and faces,
Churn cash registers,
Fill up their gas tanks,
Greet themselves with smiles.

Gleaming surfaces
Turn up everywhere,
Happy, malicious,
A mischievous glint
For each handmade eye.

You can, in season,
Stop beside the sign
In empty valley
And buy yourself one.
But it's not required.

Even if you're just
A tourist, even
If you can't see them,
You can take one home
With you, you are one.

Wisdom the Risible

"At every age we think we're having the last laugh, and at every age we're wrong."

The seven ages of wrong
Wheel by complacently. First
(Or finally, the sequence
Can't matter, each stage being
Equivalent) come the wrongs
Of infirm dependency,
The sweet, toothless confidence

That enlightenment is now
Or never, the bracketing
Exceptions being the null
Years, the happy second stage
Of private serenity,
Public humiliations
From which we gather wisdom

That enables us to view
The foibles of our younger
Or our older selves with calm,
Droll mixtures of amusement
And chagrin, knowing we are
Not now what we were then, but
Later will be as we are.

The funhouse stages mirror
Each other as otherness,
The lover, young, long, drawn out
On racks of bitter regret,
Opposite the high justice,
Wrong to a prophetic pitch,
Satisfied by defining

The fine things the future holds,
The age of optimism
For captains of drowning ships.
Ages of hazards have dreams
Like the dreams of railroad tramps
Predicated upon luck
As a reprieve from ashes.

The soldier cocooned in all
The armor of other wrongs
Nobly serving to set,
Wriggles like a hermit's thought
Messy, obsessed with pattern,
Groggy, will not find the key
God gave poets to be won.

The Winterview

A little warmth with
Cool edges to burrow
Is a forgiving thing.

The palm trees at sunset
Waving just above freezing,
The guests at the inn

Blown in from the north,
Swapping human narratives
And measurements of the cold,

The real cold, the savannah
Ape killing cold of the mountains
Left behind, are gleeful.

We're here now. We're free.
Let's come back here, let's
Get welcomed to come again.

Life under the Stars

A sorry young mule deer buck
We've taken to calling One Horn
(And even that one crooked)
Has adopted our house
As his last redoubt. He thieves
The bird seed, curls up under
The window, and will not scare.
We assume he's sick, maybe
Dying. The cold has come at last
With that transparent vengeance
Only high desert winter midnights
Can make so serenely spiteful,
Spitting stars, cracking the bones
Of the tall red rocks, not bitter,
Just merciless, like a killer
In a movie where the strangeness
Of the sociopath is his charm.
"It's a beautiful space to die,
Too bad it's killing you," I say
To the deer through the window
Before we skid down the slope
Into the quiet valley for a party
At the house of a friend struggling
Under the crushing rock slides
Of lonely alcoholism. The snow
Squeaks in protest against
Our tires, our boots, my crutches,
As if everything come in contact
Must be unbearable to the molecules
Of water and whatever fell with it.
Around the wood stove, grizzled
Men in flannel and various whiskers
Get grisly, muttering surgeries,
Joking about death. Hard to believe
This was the youth generation,
But as one sixty-something snorts,
"Age. It's happening, man." Another,
Boasts no fear of dying. A third
Disagrees.  "It's exactly dying
That scares me. It's not the death.
The arrival's the only easy part."
A fourth pats his large stomach,
And under a white beard chortles,
"I've been working on my arrival
For seventy-years." That gets
A small murmuring laugh.

The women stir and move

The conversation elsewhere.

By the time we squeak back out
Again to go home, our host
Is quietly, solemnly soused, his guests
Concerned, the deer is gone
From his nest by the wall, the cold
Even colder, the moon is up,
The snowy valley is a white sweep
Of uncountable phosphorescent
Diamonds deep basketed in night.
It's a beautiful space, too bad.

Homeostasis

Standing still, staying at home,
Racing the Red Queen to work,
Defying dissipation
To get to nowhere at all,
Life, the conservationist,
The nostalgist in defiance
Of getting it over with,

Hungry little bugger, world
Of food and scavenging,
The dream of each cell to be
Two cells, the gaunt and growing
Tree of it, eating its own,
Never content just to lie
Down and be washed by the sun,

Resilient pattern, riddle
Admitting no solution,
Headwaters of stubbornness,
Contrariness, foolishness,
Original Sisyphus,
Pushing thermodynamics
Uphill while falling, the same.