How do you guys edit these things?

I think I've already spent my enthusiasm for tinkering with this sucker. Let it be. Hahaha. Props to Noah, who actually beams with the glory which here I've simply sought to echo. Aguante Noe.

9 Asians wearing identical cowboy hats

was almost my favorite sight in Zion National Park this morning. God bless funny people. Someday, I will wander around misty rice fields bearing bucketed bamboo and wearing a nifty hat of theirs. I owe them an endearing. Plus, I owe myself a dream. I had a stress fracture so I couldn't continue hiking into the Narrows with Dave, Derek, and Alan, so I ended up just writing poetry (of all things--I hadn't expected it). I'm not much of a poet, that is to say, I haven't made the money I hear a poet should; or been trained actually; or written more than a ditty to ask the occasional girl out in high school--so enter at your own risk. Whatever happens, you'll know this: you knew what I was when you picked me up.

Not Far From Angel’s Landing

Water a flowing jade

Etched with light,

The dimmest scratch

Of gold on living glass

Later sinking into a welcomed green oblivion,

Later contorting like obsidian

Born anew to motion

Celestial as the secret of

Sky slipping through this canyon

To touch the faintest turbulence;

And the fall of white,

From high, from megalithic red,

From unknown trails that it has tunneled:

A mist of flight,

A burst of winter’s melted memory,

Soon to be but the millionth streak

Discoloring the rocky haven I long love.

A dream that has not ceased

Is this ghost town come to life:

Every streak undry,

A cataract free falling,

Fed full within a storm with a thousand joyous fellows

All translating slotted cliffs into

A mystic burst of paradise—

Once that dream came true

And I saw heaven hanging in the valley—

Veiled not far from my precipice—

A hover and a hiding and a hint of what I knew

Could be my place most beautiful;

But now, while I see jade has changed,

See unfolding ripples slowly surge like hope,

See the scratches slipping by

On sleek duned mercury--

such emerald and ebony:

the river's ribboning and molten mirroring dreams' sheen for me--

I feel the same.

Words

In Memory of Tom Riddle, Jr.

(and Steve)

"You live in this"

--Shakespeare, Sonnet 55

I pour myself in vials

(the symbols you now see)

As if each were a horcrux—

hmm...

Maybe Voldemort

was just a poet

who hadn't heard of pens

And maybe I'm just a Dark Lord

who still remembers them (!)

Just You

I think the thought of you has been

Rewinding me to Eden:

Before I said what beauty was,

Where once I watched and knew.

Let There Be

From the wet moss’d rocks, a cool—

Where the rock has gills of green;

Where water scales it backward:

A pulse that’s shimmering;

Where tears fall barely staggered

Into black trickling

In which I saw six spanglings—

Sparking like the sun

At its first uneclipsing.

But Blessed Are Your Eyes

Mountains flicker in the foam,

Gliding white on sculpted glass;

Then veins shift on the sand:

The shallows’ dance with light;

And torturings, submerged things

Which blaze the mountains more,

Entirely undisturbing though

The intricate, set shadow:

Clustered leaflike answerers

to wind and sun alone—

And many things I've always seen

unattentively.