Essays

Ben

Jon hasn’t left yet. At one point, he decided not to go home at all. At another point, he decided to move into the family home indefinitely, for months if needed. Finally, he decided to fly rather than drive and to limit his stay. He could have left last night, but he didn’t. He could have left early this morning, but he didn’t. He settled on leaving tomorrow and staying until he has to come back to Utah for his colonoscopy, the one that will reveal whether he has the same cancer as his brother.

Jon has an avoidant attachment style. That’s part of what’s causing him to vacillate. This attachment style is something he learned in his family. It’s a behavior that goes deeper than a coping skill. It’s a survival mechanism in a family where not everyone survives. What kills in his family are accidents, alcohol, bullets, and more than all the others (or alongside them), cancer. They live with a mutation that’s killing them. They don’t like to talk about it, any of it. Hence the suppression and silencing that lead to avoidance.

I can’t tell Jon what to do or point out that delaying his departure is a form of avoidance that could result in his not seeing his brother alive again. I can’t point out that he did the same thing when his mother died and when my mother died and that his avoidance kept us from seeing both our mothers alive one last time. I can only support him as he works through what he’s feeling and as I work through my own feelings about all of this: his brother, his family, their dynamics, their darkness, this dying, this loss, this death.

Nobody in Jon’s family called to tell him what was happening. The last time he spoke with his brother, which was just over a week ago, the chemo treatments were going well. His brother was optimistic. They planned on starting radiation soon. His edema was under control. He felt good. When Jon called yesterday, the extended family was in a hospital room in Iowa City. Some of them had driven from places as far away as Arizona and Tennessee. Jon’s brother was unresponsive in a bed. He was extremely thin. His hair was gone. Jon knows because his father put him on a video call with everyone in the room.

Jon’s father must have called the rest of the family days ago because those who lived at great distances had time to pack their things and make the multi-day journey across the country to be in that hospital room. Jon only found out about what had transpired because he tried to call his brother and got no answer, so he called his father. His father said, “Now’s the time to come if you’re coming,” as if Jon had let the family down somehow, as if he should have been omniscient and known what was happening without anyone telling him what was happening.

Ben. Jon’s brother is named Ben. He may or may not be alive as I write this. But his name is Ben either way. And Jon is flying home to see him tomorrow either way.

Deeded

Ben has a deeded body. He signed it over to the University of Iowa the way his mother signed hers over before she died ten years ago. He will be an anatomical gift, his parts used for teaching and research. I assume this includes his organs, teeth, bones, muscle, tendons, ligaments, blood vessels, lymphatic vessels, and lymph.

When he dies, his body will be examined to make sure it’s usable. If not, the family will have to bury him, which they can’t afford to do. If his body is viable, it will be transported to the university, where it will be studied for eighteen months. Whatever’s left will then be cremated and interred in the cemetery the university uses, the same one where his mother’s cremains were interred.

His mother was almost rejected from the program after her death because her edema and her tumors—which had made her skin as thick, lumpy, and heavy as cottage cheese in addition to invading her other organs—pushed her above the weight limit between the time she was accepted into the program and her death two weeks later. The university made an exception and took her body anyway. They’d used her in a case study and given her false hope about the potential for genetic therapy to halt her cancer’s progress. I guess they felt an obligation to her and the family after her death.

Jon and I arrived just after two transporters came to the family home to take Jon’s mother’s body to the university. We’d missed her death by a couple of hours. We stood vigil as the transporters maneuvered the gurney from the home to the hearse. They inadvertently rammed her right foot into the screen door as they navigated the doorway. One of them said, Oh, I hit her foot! I guess it doesn’t matter now. They both laughed until they saw us standing there.

It was dark. Everyone was tired, including the transporters, who had to drive all the way to Clinton from Iowa City and back again that night. The rest of the family was out behind the house staying as far away from what was happening as possible. They stood in a big circle smoking, drinking, and telling stories in their small-town Iowa accents with sentences that invariably ended with a tinny and that. Ben was there. He’d been avoiding his mother ever since her diagnosis but resurfaced the day of her death. His father probably told him, Now’s the time to come home if you’re coming, just as he did with Jon yesterday.

When asked why he’d been absent for weeks and had avoided everyone’s calls, Ben said there wasn’t anything to do. Nothing was going to change the fact that she was dying, he said, adding, I didn’t want to hear any more hopeful stories about how she might live.

I was one of the people telling those hopeful stories. I knew genetic therapy had promise. I wanted it to work. We all did. All but Ben, who was hopeless.

Ben’s mother had a deeded body. Now Ben has a deeded body. There’s no hope. No talk of hope. Ben wanted it that way with his mother and wants it that way for himself. Still, I see him as a light moving up and into a tree, where it spreads like Carl Jung’s illustration in The Red Book. I see it growing larger and larger but fainter and fainter as it expands, as it disperses, as the there of him joins the everywhere of everywhere.

The body was never a body, not really. Our bodies were never bodies. They’re Fabergé eggs that crack when they need to so the light can escape.

The Skeleton

Two days ago, I saw what was left of an animal’s body on the side of highway 17. It was stripped all the way down to its skeleton, its bones as clean as a museum display. The curved spine is what caught my attention. This was over by the construction for the bypass road on the same shoulder where we moved the porcupine after she died.

Obviously what I’m getting at is I think it might be the skeleton of that same porcupine. I want to get a better look at it on foot before someone makes off with it. But what would I do with the skeleton? I don’t know. Move it to a better spot, I guess, someplace she can literally rest her weary bones.

I have to stop thinking about this porcupine. Someday, I will.

It was not the porcupine’s skeleton. The ribs were much too large, and from one angle, I was able to see that it was a deer who was almost entirely stripped clean save for the head.

I ended up turning around in the cemetery, where I met three cows: Curly, Friday, and Jet. I stopped to say hi. They all came over to say hi back. Jet is the only one who urinated while walking toward me. It was surprising how much Jet could urinate. Jet and Friday appear to be very close. They nuzzle their heads and lie side by side in their grassy pasture. They live with a chicken. The chicken wasn’t interested in interacting with me. I don’t even know their name.

I don’t think this is the real cemetery for Toquerville. There must be another one for the pioneers, like the one over in Silver Reef. This is a more modern cemetery. The dead in it are barely dead.

Last year, a neighbor was upset that land near the cemetery is being developed. I don’t want people in their houses looking at me when I’m dead, she said. She went door to door asking folks to sign a petition to stop the development. Now, the bypass road will be back that way, too, not just houses. Things like that are going to happen, either now or after we’re dead.

If I planned on being buried, I wouldn’t really care who was looking at me from their homes or cars. I suspect something else was going on for that neighbor: something about safety, the fear of being watched without consent, something about trauma.

My husband was great this morning when I told him I needed to drive over and see if the skeleton belonged to the porcupine. He told me to watch for cars and be safe. If it’s the porcupine’s, we’ll have to go back and retrieve it after you get off work so we can relocate it, I said. I know, he said. I’ll clean out the car.

I’m glad he understands me and will

ife and the dead and bones and burials and honor and how it all somehow relates to healing.

Not the Porcupine

It was not the porcupine’s skeleton. The ribs were much too large, and from one angle, I was able to see that it was a deer who was almost entirely stripped clean save for the head.

I ended up turning around in the cemetery, where I met three cows: Curly, Friday, and Jet. I stopped to say hi. They all came over to say hi back. Jet is the only one who urinated while walking toward me. It was surprising how much Jet could urinate. Jet and Friday appear to be very close. They nuzzle their heads and lie side by side in their grassy pasture. They live with a chicken. The chicken wasn’t interested in interacting with me. I don’t even know their name.

I don’t think this is the real cemetery for Toquerville. There must be another one for the pioneers, like the one over in Silver Reef. This is a more modern cemetery. The dead in it are barely dead.

Last year, a neighbor was upset that land near the cemetery is being developed. I don’t want people in their houses looking at me when I’m dead, she said. She went door to door asking folks to sign a petition to stop the development. Now, the bypass road will be back that way, too, not just houses. Things like that are going to happen, either now or after we’re dead.

If I planned on being buried, I wouldn’t really care who was looking at me from their homes or cars. I suspect something else was going on for that neighbor: something about safety, the fear of being watched without consent, something about trauma.

My husband was great this morning when I told him I needed to drive over and see if the skeleton belonged to the porcupine. He told me to watch for cars and be safe. If it’s the porcupine’s, we’ll have to go back and retrieve it after you get off work so we can relocate it, I said. I know, he said. I’ll clean out the car.

I’m glad he understands me and wildlife and the dead and bones and burials and honor and how it all somehow relates to healing.

A Poem

A poem you sit on. A poem you lie down in and call home. A poem that has pockets. A poem that’s toasty on a cool night.

A poem that’s a place that’s a poem about a place.

A poem with protests and threats and gun shows and flags. No, not that poem. This one: a poem with barometric pressure and wind in the scrub and common ravens cawing in the air, talons curled beneath their abdomens.

A poem that’s a pencil sharpener because things can be both things and places. I heard that yesterday and I believe it. Poems believe it, too.

A poem you show to all your other poems. A poem you dress up and take to a parade. A poem with a tiara.

A poem with a behavioral problem. A poem with a hypertrophic scar. A poem with a past.

A poem that launders money through your account. A poem that has a second home it somehow paid for in cash. A poem with a boat at the marina and a state record for largest fish caught in a manmade lake. A poem that’s the grand master of its masonic lodge.

A poem that makes you feel what it wants you to feel. A poem that holds you. A poem that negs, that tucks you in at night, that says I’m sorry, that makes sure your feet are covered the way you like before it rocks you to sleep but always against its stomach, always a little too tight, and it’s rocking, too, against you, and another poem is yelling stop at the first poem but the second poem’s been drinking and the first one says don’t listen to that poem so you sleep in the first poem’s arms the way it wants you to, whatever sleep is, whatever that feels like, floating maybe. Maybe floating. Maybe darkness. You can’t ask the poem, not that poem. So you make another poem you can talk to. And another.

Like a poem you can stand on. Like a poem you can kick. Like a poem you kneel to. Like a poem you run from.

Like a poem for the dead. Like a poem for you when you’re dead. Because you’re already dead even though you’re living. You’re deadly alive. We all are. The poems say so. Because a poem is a body and also a place because poems can be both bodies and places. Because this means the poem is already dead, as dead as a body, as dead as this place will be someday long after poems are gone and the last raven has flown over what would have been our heads if we were still here.

—

The idea that a pencil sharpener is a place is something someone said in the poetry workshop last night, along with the observation that things can be both things and places, not just one or the other.

Morning Prayer October 17, 2024

Whenever I realize the heat’s kicked on for the first time in the fall, as it has today here in the cool desert, I immediately hear Glen Frey’s “The Heat Is On” in my head, including the full, ridiculously square, opening saxophone solo. And I start dancing. I dance all around the house leading with my elbows and knees, even if it’s not light out yet, even if I should be at my light therapy station soaking up my fake sun, even if I’m holding the contents of a 137-microgram bolus of liquid levothyroxine in my mouth as I have to do for ten minutes right when I wake up, even if I’m in my enormous floor-length hoodie sweatshirt pullover thing that has a pouch, even if my dog has gone back to bed after waking me twenty minutes early by ecstatically rolling all over me, even if joy seems to be a thing on a high shelf that I can’t quite reach, even if my poems are smearing into a future I can’t predict and who knows if they’ll even be there then, even if it was hard to sit in a room full of poets last night because this is a place that has always kept me out rather than letting me in, even if I don’t know where I’ll be let in if anywhere, even if I know I’ll later sit down and write yet another breathless run-on sentence that nobody asked for or particularly wants, even if I know my fingers and heart will grow heavy as I type, even if the birds aren’t yet singing because they get up late here for some reason, even if I can’t hear water moving in the creek, even if I saw a dead racoon yesterday on the side of highway 17 with a stomach swollen like an overly inflated four-square ball, even if the neighbor’s ash-gray cat is sitting in the driveway staring in this direction like she always does with her little red collar on like a tiny spiffy choker necklace as if she’s about to leave for some formal event and is judging me for being in a thing with a pouch, even if I can’t hear or see anything yet in this dark world, even if NextDoor is already sending me notifications about those damned immigrants and inumanely bred puppies with docked tails and MAGA!!! and why is my hate speech being censored, and even if I’m not in Tucson, which may or may not let me in or keep me out.

It’s unnatural. “The Heat Is On” has been embedded in my mind and body for forty years and can’t wait to come out every fall when I clearly have better things to be doing than dancing to Glen Frey. The fullish-looking moon, for example. It’s still hanging there to the west. I could be looking at it. The cool breeze. I could be out in it rather than in this artificially heated home. The one house sparrow that’s started singing. I could be wondering why that’s all I hear when we back up to wildlands. Where are the native sparrows? The verdins? The canyon wrens and rock wrens and roadrunners and lesser goldfinches and Anna’s hummingbirds? I bet they’re all over in Cholla with its shade trees and sprawling lawns. I could be thinking about that. Or the traffic that’s picking up on 17. Or the dead in the cemetery I can almost see from my house. Or the white bulls my neighbors clone. Or that dark cloud hanging above Pine Valley, which is one of the largest laccoliths in the world. Or that old gothic farmhouse. Or why anybody decided white vinyl fencing was OK. Or the rooster who’s just started to crow. He lives with the chickens I love over in Cholla. I could be thinking about him. I could be wondering if he’d dance to Glen Frey. AI says he would. I could be thinking about that.

Thanks, Glen. Thanks, 80s. I’m pulling up the music video for the song now on YouTube. Thanks, YouTube. Oh no, I’m about to dance again. The heat is on. Feel it.

Great. Now I’m thinking about “Some Like It Hot” by The Powerstation. I feel a super-duper double-song dance coming on. I didn’t know John Taylor was in that band. He was so hot. I wanted to date him and be him. I wonder if he would dance to Glen Frey.

May we all dance today, to whatever moves us, even if it’s music that’s 40 years old, which means we are something plus 40 years old.

Neighborly

Morning Prayer October 16, 2024

I’m listening to the chickens on the other side of La Verkin Creek over in the Cholla neighborhood where people have lawns and shade trees and gardens and orchards and side-by-sides and motorcycles and religion-themed Little Free Libraries and trampolines and waterfall-edge pools and corrupt former city council members and huge parties with DJs where all the dirty words in songs are replaced with nice words and big flags and banks of photovoltaic panels and gazebos and bermed landscapes and guns that they wear all the time and men who come out of their homes and surround you and ask what are you doin’ and accuse you of looking in their windows when you’re just out birding and saying you better not be a liberal and asking you what state you’re from ’cause if it’s California, you got no place here and telling you that you can’t be on city property and pointing to the No Trespassing sign they’ve posted on the city-owned bridge that connects your neighborhood to theirs and they pretty much do whatever else they darn well please, like having chickens.

I’m clearly not a fan of Cholla, but I do love those chickens. Listen to the way they greet the day. Bu-bu-bu-bu-bu bu-CAW. Bu-bu-bu-bu-bu bu-CAW. They don’t care about Cholla. Bu-CAW. They just want to chicken. Bu-CAW. So they chicken. They chicken hard, and I get to listen to it from the relative safety of my home because their vocalizations don’t stay in Cholla. They go where they want and are received by those who need to be reminded how to live above repression, above cultural toxicity, and on their own terms.

Bu-bu-bu-bu-bu bu-CAW.

Anyhoo. For the record, I’m not from California. I’m from Oklahoma. And I’m not a liberal. I’m an outsider American Leftist who’s not a tankie. And I really was surrounded by three of Cholla’s HOA members a week after we moved here when I decided to go out birding. The city almost took the bridge away when it found out what the Cholla folks were doing to intimidate folks in our neighborhood. I wrote a letter to the city saying it was all good. I made those men chocolate-chip cookies, and they brought me a passel of pomegranates, and we smoothed everything out on our own. So the bridge remains. You’re welcome, Cholla. (You can look all this up in the Toquerville City Council Meeting Minutes from 2020, which are online. I am not even exaggerating about the city threatening to take away the bridge if residents couldn’t play nice. The whole thing was ridiculous but not inconsistent with the rest of my experience in Southern Utah.)

I got distracted. Here’s the prayer part: May we all Bu-bu-bu-bu-bu bu-CAW today. Let’s chicken. Chicken like there’s no tomorrow. Chicken for those who need to hear you chicken—maybe across a creek, maybe on the other side of the world. Chicken because chickens rock and you rock, so you really should chicken.

Morning Prayer October 16, 2024

I’m listening to the chickens on the other side of La Verkin Creek over in the Cholla neighborhood where people have lawns and shade trees and gardens and orchards and side-by-sides and motorcycles and religion-themed Little Free Libraries and trampolines and waterfall-edge pools and corrupt former city council members and huge parties with DJs where all the dirty words in songs are replaced with nice words and big flags and banks of photovoltaic panels and gazebos and bermed landscapes and guns that they wear all the time and men who come out of their homes and surround you and ask what are you doin’ and accuse you of looking in their windows when you’re just out birding and saying you better not be a liberal and asking you what state you’re from ’cause if it’s California, you got no place here and telling you that you can’t be on city property and pointing to the No Trespassing sign they’ve posted on the city-owned bridge that connects your neighborhood to theirs and they pretty much do whatever else they darn well please, like having chickens.

I’m clearly not a fan of Cholla, but I do love those chickens. Listen to the way they greet the day. Bu-bu-bu-bu-bu bu-CAW. Bu-bu-bu-bu-bu bu-CAW. They don’t care about Cholla. Bu-CAW. They just want to chicken. Bu-CAW. So they chicken. They chicken hard, and I get to listen to it from the relative safety of my home because their vocalizations don’t stay in Cholla. They go where they want and are received by those who need to be reminded how to live above repression, above cultural toxicity, and on their own terms.

Bu-bu-bu-bu-bu bu-CAW.

Anyhoo. For the record, I’m not from California. I’m from Oklahoma. And I’m not a liberal. I’m an outsider American Leftist who’s not a tankie. And I really was surrounded by three of Cholla’s HOA members a week after we moved here when I decided to go out birding. The city almost took the bridge away when it found out what the Cholla folks were doing to intimidate folks in our neighborhood. I wrote a letter to the city saying it was all good. I made those men chocolate-chip cookies, and they brought me a passel of pomegranates, and we smoothed everything out on our own. So the bridge remains. You’re welcome, Cholla. (You can look all this up in the Toquerville City Council Meeting Minutes from 2020, which are online. I am not even exaggerating about the city threatening to take away the bridge if residents couldn’t play nice. The whole thing was ridiculous but not inconsistent with the rest of my experience in Southern Utah.)

I got distracted. Here’s the prayer part: May we all Bu-bu-bu-bu-bu bu-CAW today. Let’s chicken. Chicken like there’s no tomorrow. Chicken for those who need to hear you chicken—maybe across a creek, maybe on the other side of the world. Chicken because chickens rock and you rock, so you really should chicken.

The Brain

When I was a senior in high school in Oklahoma, a local bank sent toys out to folks in the community as a promotion. The toys didn’t come with instructions. To get them, you had to visit the bank, where they would try to get your business.

The toy was called The Brain. It was a gorgeous thing with a black base, moveable black wedges attached to black pins and transparent layers of clear plastic stacked on top of each other. Each layer had different shapes cut into it. Together, they could either lock or unlock each pin. The goal was to figure out how to move all the pins out and then back in.

It wasn’t easy, but I cracked the code. That’s not what’s important, though. What matters about this toy is that it was the first time I was able to wire up my brain and my muscles and my whole being. I not only cracked the code, I learned how to solve the puzzle in record time. My fingers moved without conscious thought or, rather, so fast my thinking couldn’t get in the way of the movement.

There was a tactile component to the game that was central to the experience. The moving pins clanked like a computer keyboard. To this day, I still look for keyboards that sound like The Brain. Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick. Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick. It wasn’t just one sound, either. The components in each layer of the toy rattled slightly alongside the ticking of the main pins. In the right hands, that toy was a tiny, quivering percussion instrument that sounded like ice cubes rattling in a glass. Its real calling wasn’t being a toy sent out to promote banks. It was being an instrument in an avant orchestra that only performs graphic scores.

The Brain made such an impression on me that, the other day, I noticed I was re-creating its rhythm and sound while taking my vitamins. Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick. I have a complicated system for retrieving a vitamin bottle, tick, taking a vitamin while retrieving the next bottle, tick-tick, and so forth while also arranging the bottles, tick-tick-tick, in a particular way on the counter and then placing them back on the shelves, tick-tick, following another pattern once I’ve taken them all.

The Brain taught me how to be a better flutist, how to be a writer—how to live in language at all for that matter—and how to process and store information with exceptional efficiency. Runs of notes became compact units that could be compressed in my memory and expanded when I needed to retrieve them. Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick.

Language became something I could enter into because I could type at least as fast as my thoughts. Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick.

Memory in general became something I could store in chunks without taking the time to think the words I was thinking. Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick.

Notice there are eight ticks, one for every pin. The Brain taught me to compress language, music, and thought in packets based in octals, like a computer. The Brain is actually billed as a computer. The side of the box reads, “Can you out-think the computer?” But that’s not what it was about for me. It was about streamlining my thoughts, perfecting my movements, bringing my whole self into unity, into the present, into being-ness, and not having to slow down or get mired in the difficulty of whatever I was performing or creating.

This was profound, and it was my way of making my dyslexia work for me rather than against me. It was an assistive technology that unlocked me as a person. It was an extension of me that led me back into me in ways that had been inaccessible before The Brain. It was a teacher. It was a sage. I will forever be grateful to the bank marketing team who mailed The Brain to my home and to the company that created and sold it.

Someone stole The Brain from me in college. I think it was my friend Terry Holsti. He played the trumpet and had a bag full of teeth and hair and giggled all the time and had a different moral compass from most people. He was fascinated by The Brain. He always asked me to give it to him. I hope it’s making him as happy as it made me. I really do.

O The Brain! It’s smart. It’s beautiful. It’s mysterious. It’s a see-hear-touch explosion waiting to happen with the patience of a lama. And it’s marked sold because it’s on the way to my house in Utah. I shall not navigate this place alone. I shall have The Brain by my side. Together, we will gleefully tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick who live in this area instead of allowing them to tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick run us out of here.

Toquerville Bypass Road

You know that bypass road in Toquerville that I wrote the sad porcupine poem about? Well, while we were away, a boulder the size of a truck unexpectedly dislodged from the lava outcropping they’re slicing through to accommodate the road. The boulder fell straight down into the newly paved roadway while construction workers looked on, then it sat there for weeks because nobody could figure out how to move it.

Apparently, the boulder was eventually blasted to pieces using dynamite. The neighbors told us all about it when we got back. It was the talk of the town and even made it into the local paper. (Tom Bennett from neighboring La Verkin managed to catch the boulder falling on video, which made for a good online news story.)

The company building the road won’t comment on what happened or why they failed to anticipate it. There are many more boulders where that one came from. The outcropping that’s being opened up is heavy, dense basalt on top, but below it’s a combination of veins of hard and soft sandstone deposited over time that have been completely upended by geological forces so they may run almost perpendicular to the ground like the ones behind our home do. That’s important because it means water can erode the now vertical or nearly vertical veins more readily than if they were sandwiched horizontally between harder layers. Within all that sandstone are boulders of varying sizes, apparently including those the size of a truck.

There are houses up on that outcropping, too, which makes no sense. A little ways over by the Virgin River, a house slid into the gorge a couple of years ago. Other homes have been abandoned or are at risk. We saw someone trying to shore their property up with a massive retaining wall that eventually slid into the gorge along with their hummingbird feeder. Those people are gone now. They left their Joshua tree behind.

We’re in an erosion zone here as well, so everything is always cracking and crumbling and siding down to the lowest point it can find. This land’s essence is change. It doesn’t care one iota about smooshing people, houses, and roads as it continually changes.

But we care. So we talk about the big boulder and incorporate it into local lore and Henny Penny about it for weeks on end—and when the bypass road finally opens, sure we’ll drive on it, but probably not without looking up and saying a little prayer. We’ll be looking for boulders, to be clear, not toward the heavens.

I’m not sure how this bypass road conforms with Chapter 16 of Toquerville’s City Code, which requires the preservation and treatment of sensitive lands, including ensuring no hazards are created, such as rockfalls, and protecting and preserving significant natural and visual resources, such as lava outcroppings. But what do I know? Maybe I’m still just upset about the porcupine. (I’m definitely still upset about the porcupine.)