The Flute Player

On the sharp ridge joining
The sacred and profane,
Our favorite secret place,
We caught the gauzy clouds
Of a gaudy sunset
And would have been content

With that grandeur alone,
Except that evening winds
Decided to grace us
With an extra magic
We'd never known before.
What was that faint music?

Keening, rhythmic, sweet-toned,
But not quite melodic
And vaguely percussive,
It circled the compass,
Coming from one canyon
First, then the opposite.

We couldn't locate it,
Shifting with the slant light,
So that we'd pause and tilt
And peer this way or that.
Someone's campsite? A car
Down River Road? Hikers?

It sounded like a flute,
The tune it carried was
Something repetitive,
Plaintive, introspective.
It rose from nowhere,
Died away on the air

And then returned again,
Slightly altered, elsewhere.
Listening, leaning in
To cup it from silence,
Was to hear the double
Meaning of enchantment.

To the Dead, the Half-Dead, and the Riddles of Paradox

I can just imagine running into 
One of your faithful family some day
In Moab or Fruita or some damn place
And being recognized as the weird guy
Who desecrated your cemetery
And on Memorial Day of all days.
Even as I drove away, in my head
I was already explaining myself
To my insulted interlocutor,
Unskeining tangled, loopy narration.

How far back do I start? Two days ago,
You see, I was telling my wife Sarah
About Decoration Day in the South,
About how seriously country folk
Took the ritual of fixing up graves,
Something akin to ancestor worship,
Although the symbols of flags and crosses
Paid highest homage to Christ and country.
I wasn't thinking of Colorado.
It was a casual conversation.

This morning began with no thought of graves,
Only frustration at feeling housebound 
By the holiday hordes swarming our town.
How to get out without getting crowded?
We decided to bundle the baby
And a picnic of simple sandwiches
And drive until we reached somewhere quiet,
Preferably somewhere we had not yet been.
We looped south around the La Sal Mountains,
Until we dropped down into Paradox.

We'd heard of Paradox before from friends,
I'd even wandered down the valley once
Alone on an autumn drive. One friend said
It was Castle Valley's doppelgänger,
Another said it was the same valley
Bisected by the mushrooming La Sals.
Either way it bore some strange relation
To our home valley on the other side.
The name alone made a visit tempting,
So we turned off the main road and drove in.

In the center of the valley, a hill,
Just a bump compared to the towering
Red-rock rim and heaped-up snow-capped giants
Surrounding it, circled by a wire fence,
Sported a slightly battered wrought white gate
Proclaiming "Paradox Cemetery."
It just seemed too perfect for a picnic,
Under all that windy, cloud-sweeping sky,
And when we drove around the loop of plots
We were charmed by all the decorations.

In addition to fresh flags and flowers,
Mostly brightly colored silks and plastics,
Numerous more idiosyncratic 
Touches flourished among modest headstones,
A grave covered in white-painted pebbles
Beside a grave covered in colored glass,
Graves with dangling ornamental abstracts
In brass or copper, or hanging lanterns.
And there, the largest tombstone on the hill,
Drab slab with one word facing us: "Riddle."

We stopped there. We meant no disrespect, but
How ideally improbable is that:
A Riddle is buried in Paradox?
On the far side of the Riddle's tombstone,
Lay the pair of graves, one with white pebbles
By one with colored glass, and a small shade tree
Over them, beside a tumbled cherub.
We spread our picnic by the little tree,
Facing the Riddle, and Sarah, who's slept 
Hardly at all for weeks, made a droll toast:

"To the dead, the half dead, and the Riddles
Of Paradox!" I laughed, the baby cooed,
The wind tossed the sparse leaves of the lone tree,
And the Memorial sun shone brightly
On the American flags, the crosses,
The newly placed, fluttering silk bouquets,
The faded fragments of past years' bouquets
Now scattered in the tufts of new-mown grass,
And down the whole, long valley, green with spring.
After lunch I lay back and thought I'd nap.

Sarah could take photos of the gravesides,
The baby could snooze in pale shade with me,
And maybe a profound thought might occur
To one of us, worthy of the setting.
Then biology trumped profundity.
A squelching sound like a boot stuck in mud
Came from under the baby. I sat up,
Sarah got the diaper bag from the car,
And we surveyed the damage: our cherub
Had soiled three layers of onesies and pants.

We got her up and stripped from the waist down,
Balanced upright while one of us mopped up 
The front side of her, the other the back.
That was our family tableau,
Three strangers, unrelated to the dead
Buried and decorated around us,
When your family pulled up in two trucks,
A stout troop wielding rakes, hoes, and flowers.
What could we do? We cleaned up our daughter,
Waved at the Riddles, packed up, and drove home.

Hear No Helpful, See No Helpful, Do No Helpful

I met a guru with no disciples
Working in a laundromat
Who sagely informed me that
Hamlet had the right question
And all others were trifles.
He hadn't answered it yet.

I met a bro-dude in Moab
Sporting a hippy-length beard,
Curled and coiffed as a cavalier,
Who wore his philosophy
On his brand-new, bright-blue
T-shirt: "Your ego is not
Your amigo," it sneered.

I met a beige wall of dust and wind
Blowing outside a Walmart
In Grand Junction. It said nothing
For all that it had a huge voice.
I didn't have the heart to start
To question so inhuman a thing,
As if I had any choice.

So Moses Wants to Stay in Egypt

Late May in Red Rock Country, and the plagues descend.
Every afternoon now, armies of grasshoppers
Decamped in the Indian grass around the house
Begin their suicidal assaults on the porch.
Perched on my knees they appear ornately armored
As feudal samurai, as Tiffany lampshades,
Absurdly decorative dress for a battle,
And battle it is of some kind, although I can't
Begin to understand their mad plan of attack.
I've read somewhere that cannibalism moves them,
That they only swarm when fleeing each other.
They pelt me in their desperation; then leap away.

And then there's the wind. On any given evening,
This sublimely peaceful valley, full of birdsong,
And of course the chorusing of all those insects,
Can gather its soft, sighing, blissful breezes,
And begin to hum, hiss, rumble, moan, and then rage,
Snapping the resilient tree branches back and forth
Rippling, then flattening the long dry grasses,
Driving even ravens and grasshoppers to ground,
Until tall dust devils, the ground itself disturbed,
Start swirling into life. The view from the window,
If one is lucky enough to be behind one
And foolish enough to look out, goes somber brown.

Meanwhile, inside the house, the clever mice hide out,
Making nests in the insulation and the trash.
Mammal myself, I have an unreasonable
Affection for these pests, whose motives I can grasp.
Every night I bait and set the traps, every night
Or almost, one of the quivering whiskered imps
Finds itself keeping house in one of my prisons,
Taking solace in the pine-nut hoard that lured it.
Come windy, grasshopper-tormented afternoon,
I cart out my cellmate, shit-smeared prison and all,
Set the trap on the floor of the truck and drive out,
To dump my friend somewhere fair, too far to come back.

Usually, I leave the valley and stop along
The River Road, sacred heart of geology
First haunted, then rafted, then mapped, then ranched, then filmed,
Then mined, then paved, then hiked, biked, and rafted again
By my personal species of mammalian pests,
The ones who write poems and give names to everything,
Although we are never entirely sure whether
We intend to ennoble ourselves or the things
Named with all our naming and renaming of them.
This time of year, both road and river become clogged,
The first with motorized and recreational
Vehicles of all sizes, swaying in the winds,

The latter with orange rafts, orange life-jackets,
Orange inner-tubes bearing orange-skinned humans
From climates more appropriate to hidden skin,
Floating and shouting and picnicking and camping,
Occasionally drowning, I suppose, to trust
The holiday postmortems in the local news.
Those who put up with grasshoppers, windstorms, and mice
On a yearly basis, who boast of paying dues
To live yearlong in this place that others visit,
Happily consider the visitors a plague
Unto themselves, although a plague one profits by,
As the locals once profited by grasshoppers.

In town, that plague of visitors spends hard,
The big, little, and medium spenders swarming,
Like the different sizes of grasshoppers (surely
You saw that simile coming), flinging themselves
At the gift shops, the gas stations, the grocery stores,
The windows of places promising adventures,
The porches of cafes and outdoor gear supply
Outlets, the tented parks setting up festivals
Of all the things that crowded people will fly to--
Food, music, art, and most peculiarly of all,
Each other, another outbreak species, I think
Archly, hiding out on this dusty, bug-strewn porch.

As Dreams Are Made

"Something in the Cat Is Always Awake"

You are not the dreamer.
A body dreams it sleeps.
A body dreams it wakes.

You are one of the dreams.
The world you feel is you,
A state your body makes.

You feel faint awareness
Of worlds outside that world
That you know to be true,

Dreams of other bodies,
Other dreams your body
Makes that are without you.

Dream that you are, you won't  
Leave off troubling yourself
With how to be more real,

Caught up in paradox,
Loneness, duality,
Koans you can't anneal.

What is that tenuous
But insuperable
Thread stitching your intent,

Glowing fabrication
Of the mind, down the seam
That joins you to events?

You're not a rock dreaming
Of being a person
Nor a person dreaming

Of being a rock, you
Are the dream that they both,
Thrown together, produce.

I'm writing this all wrong,
That shouldn't need writing
At all, poesy and puff,

Great strange dream that I am,
Trivial spectator,
Dream such as makes up stuff.

Irresponsible

The will is free
If you will, but
Never very
Large at all, nor

Significant,
At least not more
Than other wills,
Other causes,

The myriad
Of minuscule,
Imbricated,
Bumps and nudges,

The Brownian
Helter-skelter
Co-creating
The whole mad waltz.

Lethe

You'll forget anything 
That you do more than once.
Only the singular
Memories more or less
Stay labeled and intact.
Three years ago this date,

My lover and a nurse
Hauled me from a gurney
Onto a huge wheelchair
Designed for stroke victims,
Cranked me partway upright,
And rolled me into sun,

Between the hospital
Fountains and the highway,
South of Salt Lake City.
The chair felt like a boat,
Long white sheets in full sail.
Never did that again,

Never hope to do so.
Two years ago this date
My new bride and I drove
A white boat of a truck
From Helen Gorge over
Red sands and spinifex

Horizons under blue
Skies through clouds of black flies,
In Australia's NT,
Past carcasses and wrecks,
Nearly getting stuck once,
A one of its kind day.

I remember it well.
But just a year ago
We spent the day doing
All our favorite things
By the lake. That's a blur.
The best day of them all.