Looking down onto the desert
I am reminded of the dollops
in his throat – it could just be
the clouds or how the currency
of his voice was always paid in
whiskey clinks (Were aces wild
or bases loaded? There’s only so
much one remembers); it could be
too a resistantly lingering vapor, but
a whiff of that surly misdemeanor, now
gone all but non-existent – a stinking ex-
tinction the whole of which I’d welcome
for an instant – or two – and not in a regret-
ful nor a spiteful way, either (Oh, how very
skewed becomes each glanced perspective!)….
Would that I could pay my way clear through
the pink rock-like layers that compose such
beautiful buttes as those that I have yet to
completely imagine. But come now would I,
could I (?), if but to ascertain precisely my
particular description; how each (to a man)
whose clipped talk was such a dreamy golden
voice gone voiceless – (ah, but whose now
hasn’t?) – was everything that’s me and mine
in just one singular cloud that drops by, stays
a little while, then drops a little rain upon
the desert and (poof!) was just a cloud all
by itself (like me, like I am now, an isolated
puff)? How distant are the layers of that cake!
And to the prick how each (a he) he must have
convulsed from such repulsion, and with urgency
and in direct polarity with apparently misleading
charm, that with a similar conviction and speed
a quick storm exhibits as it hops across the sage-
brush of a summer afternoon – or how a bit
further into the frontier a casino’s change
leaks softly-swiftly into pocket – with a whoosh! –
it’s vanished irrevocably, leaving for jilted memory
all sorts of bruises and cuts that in turn will leave
scars, the very templates of bitter remembrance,
and hands that remember being full with what’s
gone – as with a ghost town’s erstwhile panhandlers’….
This story of a couple of men once disguised as side-
burns walking through an arboretum, and how they
were at once two books that being stolen from a
leisure van parked on a little rock in Little Rock….
How that little black pocket rock once conveyed
a made-up mood, a few feelings, for example,
like the ones given out by whistling sagebrush –
those same clumps disintegrated by the dis-
appearance – now gone so damp as to give
a vertigo, a berserk and unconventional
spin. And do they ever spin! They spin
until all of my arms and teeth are lost,
until a single blunt post of saguaro gets
stuck somewhere in the rainforest of a
distant hemisphere as the vague scent of
whiskey as it clicks or as it clinks through
the bone-chill night after night after night
toward the rocks that are uplifted and carried
by the dreaming wind until dropped as a stack
like silver dollar pancakes into blood-colored
buttes. And nearby, where burial grounds
grow paler pink under the scorch – “We’re
going to Illinois…aren’t we?” –I thought I
heard him say. “If just to perk things up
a little bit” – (But where did we ever go?
And will it ever be remembered?)….
The once and all familiar….
And then we….
At last… And
since…. (a dis-
continuance)
