Guide to Identifying Venomous Events in Utah

The past keeps changing. It's the only thing,
And it's no damned thing at all. Past's the snake
Curled up, slender as a toddler's finger,
Delicate as a Chiluly tendril

In a ball at the bottom of the stairs
Of an unfinished hotel near Zion,
Grey and perfect, ashed twig with a red tip,
Sign that it's time for a fresh Exodus,

Although the staff worker staring at it
Was just trying to figure out a way
To get the damned thing out of there without
Having to test if it was venomous.

A small man leaning on a yucca cane,

Limping by, offered a non-Biblical,

More pagan allegorical option,
Guise of fool meets trickster in wilderness

And trickster offers to help fool escape
From some perilous, absurd dilemma.
He used his cane to nudge the viper,
Who moved like wind-blown water when provoked,

Away from the stairs and out of the door.
The snake, energized to still be alive
Disappeared back into the desert scrub,
Not to be seen again. The end of that.

But the past keeps changing. The next morning,
The trickster overheard the fool boasting
To two young women about the grim snake
And how he used a stick to banish it.

Pay attention. This is where the story
Inevitably departs from story
And loses those readers baying like hounds
After narrative prey they smell as there

Once the fable itself has gone to ground
Leaving nothing behind but fools and hounds.
The trickster never deigns to curse the fools.
He makes no evil riddles of his name.

He does muse a little on the way lies
Are all we are left with once we begin
To want to get closer to the wonder
That everything we believe is a sin,

And the place that is now a finished inn,
Full of guests, children playing at the pool
Today in the open, serrated jaws
That shape the aging maw of wilderness,

Dark trees, bright red-and-white mountains, black sands,
The banded ash of the changeling hiding
Beside the emerald rattler brood in rocks
That will never do anything but fade,

Occupies the once-promising moment
When a small man and a woman made plans
To intertwine lives. The past keeps changing.
There was a story, once. Fire tailed. Ash eyed.

So

How totally enough it is to be tough--
Not phony tough, not dangerous,
Not I-want-to-be-your-worst
Mutilatory gangster, fascist, nightmare
Terrorist, revolutionary, cop tough. No.

It's beautiful just to be perfectly,
Indestructibly, indubitably tough.
There's no more boasting, bombing
Threats, or rhetoric necessary, no saber-
Toothed Gatling guns then, men. Just enough.

Zion Pizza and Beers

The desert wants you thirsty,
And the chef wants you hungry.
The looming rain forest wants you gloomy,
And the coast wants you moody and distressed.

But god and the gangster, the thief,
And the fantastist terrorist
Just want you to believe that they're
The real poets, to hell with the rest.

Pretty Picture Anyway

There was one poet
Parent to all the rest,
And his name was
Something pretty close

To what the word Narcissus

Might translate through to you

And yours, if translation

Were not poetically impossible.

Ghost Rock, Black Dragon, God

Things that don't exist except
As names for things that do
Have demonyms as well

For the inhabitants of such things.
There are the black flies at Ghost,
Tiny, determined, parasitized themselves

To no end, biting your ears and eyes,
Known to some as the Hangarians;
The heavy coughing attacks at Dragon,

Known as the Converserials;
The unmentionables who swarm
The outer precincts of divinity

Known as the Impardomites.
None of these words or phrases
Are simple enough to get the job done,

Common enough to belong to everyone.
Someone with a chip of something-not-a-thing
On the shoulder, maybe just a bit off

The old block, maybe just a pick cold
Shoulder padded with care to turn
And shrug so effortlessly away

The coarse girl and her décolleté could capture
That essential residential pun
Of the we are, there be, the not, the undone.

Lost White Men

Not many of them really,
Not considering the long,
Slow shift of population

Replacement that was the west
American genocide.
Other than Custer, who knows

Exactly how many names
Of men on the "winning" side
Came to their violent end,

Their corpses emptied of dreams
Of conquest and future farms
Heavy with blossoms in spring

Belonging to them and theirs
Deservedly for having
Exterminated heathen?

Enough of them lie scattered
About this landscape to be
A part of its tragedy.

In the middle of a burn
That turned a canyon lovely
That had been covered in scrub

Hiding the square white stone fence
Containing ten men's remains,
Eight of them whites and two Utes,

A visitor, for a while,
Until green recovery
Over the next few decades

Hides it all again, can see
From the gold-miners' ruins
At the top of the canyon,

Down the broad sweep of bleached oak
Skeletons green at ankle
To the battlefield gravesite

Of this very last skirmish
Over which people would live
How they could in these mountains,

To the farm cemetery
Filled with the graves of infants
Of the post-miner settlers,

To the contemporary grid
Of empty vacation homes
Irrigated from deep wells

On the valley floor that was
A ranch a while, a campsite,
A blank. Have mercy, my god.

Events, Homes, Spouses

Some people, I expect, grow
Closer to other people, to love
And the love of loved ones, as they begin

To die, to know, to accept
Fully the knowing that they're going
To die. Others I know and know

I will never mention, grow
More remote from the threaded
Human fiction and the squinting

At the beautiful details of Bayeux
Or whatever their loves most resemble--
Unicorns, bedrooms with trees in them,

Delicate forgiveness holding hands--
And closer, closer, closer to this
Plateaued, unscrutinizing, atmospheric

World.