framing scrap

juniper coals

juniper & cholla

fire in the fishtank

in your living room, what arrangements have you made? I know sometimes the couches and chairs face a coffee table, sometimes they face the big TV or they just face each other. how about your furniture? that’s mainly what I’m wondering.

front-loading washer, Victrola, flypaper; these have all been possibilities. we’ve got a computer in our front room and when we're playing with little Ash, sometimes the screensaver-slideshow comes on and she gets distracted and starts smiling at all the pictures.

a couple months ago someone’s stucco burned down. this was in New Mexico and they had left their fish tank running in the house. you know how the big ones have electric lights and heaters and pumps and things to keep everything going. well, it turns out that’s where it started.

oh! and then there’s the flat screen fish tank which is also electric.

so in the interest of glowing screens and a long cold month in the middle of winter I was thinking how it would really be something to do a series of photos on fire. these will all be fires from the east end of my living room.
sorry if this is a bit jumpy; I keep turning around, distracted. we’re getting chickadees again at our feeder for the first time in like 3 years. finally!

Baffled

Last month, it was football players
Robbed the malt shop and set fire
To the Splish Splash carwash “between 3 and 5:30 am.”
A roommate brought a sackfull of quarters
To the bank and sang, they say, like a canary
In a courthouse.

There’s a mantle of sweet apples on the ground,
Under the tree and under the snow,
Rotting here and there between freeze and thaw.
This brings in a few hungry deer most nights,
Thumping, munching, scraping up what they can.
This, I think, I can understand.

But this arson, I know, has been an occasion
for improved business across my street.
The House of Suds brings in all characters.
Like the guy there right now, just began
Spraying down a red Mustang with foam at 5:30am
In the frozen darkness.

I want the big brefes

this morning I wore a baseball hat to breakfast. I could get used to this: getting out of bed, putting on some pants and just starting my day.

it was the Lunds’ annual Christmas breakfast, which they host over at the senior center, the same place we go to vote. we’ve been hearing about this for a few years but finally had a chance to go. sausage, eggs, hashbrowns. french toast on home-baked bread. not bad.

and Brother MacA had left several boxes of old free books out on a table. you may remember Bro. MacA’s free books from last year’s ward Christmas party. anyway whenever you bring up Bro. MacA’s free books later to thank him, he says something like “oh, some of them weren’t supposed to be out there,” that he didn’t intend to get rid of those particular ones and that he would probably like them back. Bro. MacA is senile and doddering and gets around with either a walker or a small electric motor.

Here are the books we took:


The Art of Walt Disney
The Essene Gospel of Peace
Great Basin Kingdom – Leonard Arrington
New Genesis: A Mormon Reader on Land and Community
and
There’s No Such Place as Far Away - Richard Bach
in which Kelly found this loose and cryptic recipe card of a footnote, apparently referencing someone’s itinerant religious library.
this method of citation struck us a pretty inventive, although a nightmare, I’m sure, for librarians and those looking for primary sources.

when I told Bro. MacA how glad I was to find Great Basin Kingdom in his piles and “thanks,” he said that the ragged paperback was worth like $35 and that he hadn’t meant to put it out.

living with machines, trouble with machines

the dawnland

headlessness awareness

3.9

yesterday afternoon I drove a dozen or so cub scouts down to the limestone quarry behind the temple in Manti. we were working on the Geologist activity badge and wanted to get a look at where oolite comes from. after a few of them piled out from the cab, and then like another ten from the back of the pickup, we all walked past the no trespassing signs, climbed over the entry gate and looked around a little.

on Monday afternoons they're pretty bored of listening all day in school. so I let them run around for a while, climb on rocks, wander off to pee on things, chase rabbits around and throw stuff at each other. then eventually I rounded everyone back up so we could start checking the boxes.

requirement 1: collect 5 geological specimens that have important uses.
"OK, OK. who can tell me what some of these rocks could be used for?"

"RUBBING TOGETHER TO MAKE FIRE!" "FIRING IN SLINGSHOTS!" "SMASHING!"

requirement 5: explain how mountains are formed.
"OK.OK. good. now, see those mountains over there? how do you think they got there?"

"VOLCANOOOOOS!" "erosion!" "EARTHQUAKES!"
and that's about when the big corrugated steel warehouse to our north shook itself like a wet dog. weird.*

requirement 7: describe what a fossil is.
"hey, alright. now, what's a fossil?" and before I can even finish the question…
"A DINOSAUR!" "TRILOBITES!" "SHELLS!" "METEORS!" "BONES AND SKULLS AND FISH BONES" "I FOUND A FOSSIL BY MY DRIVEWAY!"
of course they're really into fossils. it's their favorite. this is especially the case with Ricky C. Ricky C names his rocks. once, when making a pile of rocks, he asked whether he was to pile the boy rocks or the girl rocks. it was decided that he make two piles.

requirement 2: rocks and minerals are used in metals, glass jewelry, road-building products and fertilizer. give example of minerals used in these products.
well, one example is lead, which turned up in over a million of these things.there was a recall last month on the plastic totem badges from China. in other news, the marquee outside the elementary school tells us that it’s time again for picture retakes.

* just this morning I heard that it was an earthquake that hit yesterday afternoon.

all saints story problem

there's an old man in my neighborhood,
who cashed it all out this Halloween.

$1,000 in $5 bills
on his dining room table, stacked, waiting.

all evening he waited, marking the time
with the hiss and tick of his oxygen.

“hey, so are you guys out trick-or-treating?”
he yelled to mother and son from his porch.

I heard that like 3 or 4 people came by.

5 fungi

4 moons

3 fall haiku, looking up

a mourning dove hung
on the wire line one evening
like a long soft blade

we two lay supine
and looking up, the branches
burned? were not consumed?

then sleep under the
smoke detector’s speck light, to
wake in giant moonlight.

teenwolf exodus blues

when an overfriendly recent divorcée of middle-age pulls up in her maroon Camaro and decides to buy the home you’re renting, this is when you begin to notice other “for rent” signs around town.

when one Sunday afternoon she backs a truck up the lawn to her door and moves in, you close the blinds for a while. but when you see her swinging brooms and hand-trowels at the swallows nesting in your eaves, you begin writing down the phone numbers you read on those signs.

and when she repeatedly mentions to you her plans to “leather the walls”(?), rip out this and that, pour cement and spray the poppies, you make some of those calls, evacuate your trees and start collecting boxes.

when she, with arms and painted nails already outstretched, asks to hold the baby, be sure you can think of something quick. anything will do, really; “terribly sorry, we um, just vacuumed” or “that’s ok, she’s still pretty light. see?”

when daily you hear her fussing and barking around back with her grandkids and several gentlemen callers you turn on some music and start shuttling your furniture across town by the pickup-load.

now in the mean time, as she plants a graveyard of withering Memorial Day mums out on the corner, brews a tea of dead willows in a trashcan on the lawn, leaves a big cardboard box of storebought carrots to rot on your porch for weeks and begins erecting chainlink around the perimeter, this is when you make it clear to visiting friends and neighbors that these “projects” are not your own.

later, after digging your potatoes like a starving Dutchman, when she then tells you about how lucrative her new work-from-home weed pulling business is becoming, this is when you gather your last hoses and pick any remaining pumpkins.

when finally she goes out and buys a new toilet seat with your security deposit, you dust off your feet and cut your losses.