Frog

The mind flops around in the brain,
Smacking back and forth in the skull,
From a camelid in Utah
Browsing in snowy junipers
To nostalgia for a cafe
Near a busy intersection
Where a conversation took place
About mining towns and tree poems

The last time today was today.
It flips, it sprawls, it smears the walls
Of its mossy cavern with streaks
Of thoughts about peculiar things
That mean nothing at all outside
Its small circus of memories,
Kindergarten Batman, balloons
In ICU, fourth-grade bow ties,

Hockey flag-waving on TV,
Bicentennial wallpaper,
Insurance office cubicles,
Frozen milk outside the window,
An Irish voice over the phone
One afternoon in Atlanta,
Fog on a Birmingham hillside,
All those hurdles, such a small pond.

I Guess She Nicked Her Heart

No idea where this came from
In the middle of the night,
In the middle of Orem,
In the middle of Utah,
At the edge of what used to be

A whole lot of nothing
To most human beings
And an ordinary home
Full of the usual sacred landmarks
To scattered hunter-gatherers.

I suspect it was something
Sarah said to me or I
To Sarah, a few days ago,
That I woke up to jot down
As snow fell around last night.

What is the life of a phrase,
The peculiar existence,
More than a mere word,
Less than a composition,
Haunting a language?

Part of the culture-drunk mind
Attempts to parse it tightly
Term by term--guess, nick,
Heart. It all makes sense,
Except that it doesn't at all.

Somewhere near the part
Of the brain that raises alarms
To wake the multi-trillion cell
Body's community at night
Words still weird work, like runes.

What the Ghost Wrote on the Wall

I'm just going to try to breathe
Until I'm dead, said the mouse
In the tunnel of the trap
In a corner of the house

While the long night came and went
With the hunger and the piss
Until dawn winked in the trap
Smiling, You will die like this

The Cow of Death

Appears in the dark
Of the brilliant headlights

Giant, gleaming, inky
Slab of disaster

Missed, just barely
By a lane's width

Had the car
Approached the cow

From the other lane
Shuddering

That breaks regret
Into recyclable morsels

For the ravens
And the ambulance

Would have ended
This rumination

Under the moon

Rocks

The first time Sarah
Got out of the car
To study the ground
For rocks, we were here
Near Factory Butte.

She moved like a bird,
Like a sandpiper,
Over what had been
Shore epochs ago,
Stalking her quarry.

We've carried the rocks
In my car, our truck
Almost four years now.
I can't picture them.
I still picture her

Scrutinizing them,
Revealing herself
To me the first time,
Today as I watch
Our toddling daughter

Not fifteen months old,
Scrutinize what looks
Like pure sand to me,
And pick out chert, shells,
Basalt, memory.

Sexy Gimps with Masks in a Futuristic World

My wife has her way with
Phrases that make me laugh,
Too good for poetry,
Too oddly fragmented
For novel or memoir,
Too true for religion.

In the midst of Scrabble
Games, I scribble them down.
Over early morning chit-chat,
Toddler bumping our knees
And assaulting our ears,
I tap them in my phone.

A man with a muse has
An advantage over
Other poetasters
He should never neglect.
Humbly he should borrow
What others cannot steal.

The Nonsensical Fable

"Thus the spell was broken"

A scholar drove along the road
That led past the river, to town.
Along the way he hummed a song
About the fine dinner he planned.

Out of the corner of his eye,
He saw one of the crumbling cliffs
Of naked rock that lined the route
Begin to quiver in the sun,

As if it were undecided
Whether to collapse or stand firm
Or hitch up its rock skirts and run,
Which made the scholar stop and think,

As scholars, like opossums, will,
Thoughtfulness misidentified 
As feigning death,
And the scholar stayed motionless,

Waiting in case the cliff could prove
It had indeed begun to move,
And debated within himself
Which was the cliff and which his mind.

All afternoon he waited there,
Past the time his body grew bored
And left him to drive into town
And have that fine dinner itself.

Everything in the scholar's mind 
Began to waver with the cliff.
Dreams slowly shifted off ledges
And settled in memory's dust

That floated up in the sunlight,
Obscuring the sky and the cliffs,
Wheeled and settled slowly, trembling,
Confused, dust of life, light, cliffs, mind.

The scholar was not forgetful.
He had become disorganized,
So unbecoming a scholar.
When the cliff shifted, he was gone.