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>font color="800000"> Ashes Ceremony on the Roaring Fork
The river was swollen big hearted,
heavy with a winter's runoff, yet sullen,
the colors of muddy ash, every rock
hidden deep under the waves
a family secret. I could see
splashes of disembodied rainbows through
the prism of the river spray.
It heaved with cataracts & whispers,
flowed into a larger, more famous, truncated
& dammed river,
until just a
droplet reached the Gulf of California. Ê
The rafters floated past like corsages.
The 82 year old patriarch hung an American
flag with his son's photo in the
Kiwanis Park picnic enclosure. We
were family.
We tossed small fistfuls of his ashes
against the wind, into the current,
some mingled on the breeze with the
hot mosquitoes
& were blown far into the
river's edge trees;
the rest made it into the sunlit shallows
with our unspoken prayers.
The Roaring Fork, deliberate & swift
- shared nothing
with those he left behind but its own fate.
At that moment
there wasnÕt a drop of fraudulent life
on earth.
We waved at the rafters floating by & I
think I forgot to whisper
under my breath,
peace on your journey
to the wild Colorado.
Ê
Elegy
I'm thinking about an ellipsis
of small towns on the Little Snake River,
Baggs,
Dixon,
Savery,
even memory has forgotten them.
The eastern most one drops like a cookie
into the cold milk of Colorado.
They're still fragrant with neglect
& lost ranches, old
timers safely spirited away in
unruly frontier grasses,
in unsavory graves.
Baggs,
- my grandfather's town,
my mother's town
can't be
lured away from the highway by
obsolescence or death,
every Wyoming cowboy has stayed
or drank at the Drifter's Inn at one
time in his mind
or another. The
lobby is red brick slick with snow.
In the bar I order a beer, the highway
to Rawlins is closed.
I can't stay long.
I've got people buried here.
Holy Ghost Creek
A lucky orange dog with thick hair & red
bandana crosses the interstate near
Glorieta Pass,
not quite controlled burn smoke
hangs in the valley, low
leathery brown over the round
green hills all muddied together
like spirit bison.
Up the trail along the Holy Ghost to old
Baldy, ascending tiers of tiny pastures
fading yellow now
fervid with September asters &
cinquefoil,
the higher I hike
the burbling trickle of a creek
crosses me more than once.
I've imagined it
coursing through my veins,
- blood disciple,
a transfusion of headwaters
streaming in spring
cataracts down from a
treeless domed summit
& running away with the best of me
until it plows into the indefatigable
Pecos, shedding its snowmelt,
destined for the valley of
these summer burns.
Impervious old Baldy
the clouds build themselves about
his mastiff head in
no particular order;
there were herds of bison
down below the smoke once;
their spirit shadows drink from
the Holy Ghost, still.
The Curvature of the Earth
I.
watch the old crank Apache Nana,
seventy winters old,
heavy gold watch chains
dangling from each pierced ear,
walk with a limp,
mount a spotted pony & out ride
his shadow through the dust whorls
to the bottom of the sky,
to sing with the wind like R.L. Burnside,
old holy American whisky
ghost of the blues,
his grey ghost is our ghost, Ê
so close to this dry winter ghost
of a river,
he became the ghost who
listens still to the ghost;
surveys the despoblados, an
abandoned empty canvas upon which
he paints the last of their faces, where
he holds close to the soul these
blistering visions of the near future
marching towards him, the
solemnity of the earthÕs cadence: the
solitary drum beat,
the banner unfurled & erect in the martial wind
the mutilated
strewn like laundry
across the desert.
2.
My mother's last days, her leathery
hand squeezed & released the mattress
edge, curled into decaying matter once
herself, hair more grey smoke than hair,
her shadow out rode her to the wild horses
she saw on the abandoned canvas of
the wall. She ate ice cream &
gestured with
her plastic spoon at their cadenced muscularity,
swiftness & bone;
while Nana admires their endurance
in sync with his own--
these stolen ponies
are still the quotidian
medium of exchange.
I'm thinking:
a hot distant dusty whorl of a
wind must've mewled against her window
that day, to separate it in my mind
from all of the
other days,
when sunlight grinds into night
& the curvature of the earth
is not etched in stone.
A shadow is all that's left of her
To give up.
When I think of her homestead Wyoming:
taut women, ranch families,
spirals of rusted barbed wire dangling
like watch chains from bereft fence posts,
noisy chinooks that converge on cottonwoods,
Indian paintbrush blossoms.
3.
Nana grinds his pony to a halt in the
<blue tense desert light-
earth is a dead canvas,
the sky is underground,
replete with
fallen stars.
Ghosting Sonora
- across this feral
in the shadow
of the desert bestiaries,
the murky,
ominous autumn calm of the red
rock necropolis,
in the blue darkness of
the ragged hondos,
"a caked
- depopulated hell"
the stutterer, Juh,
Chief of the Chiricahua romps,
beat,
no born
to kill tattoos on his forearm,
has a tribe of bitter deaths to bury.
Sires three boy warriors
& one hundred
twenty years later
Guantanamo Bay is
run by the same scalphunters now
pursuing him across
the grim outback.
He never had to pray to
Priapus for the
endurance to defend his people
or confront
this American war with more war-
cohort of Mangas &
fire lord Cochise,
he lost the Mexican army in the fog.
As open a prayer as
pure space was
there was still
room for extinction,
the more he lost
the more he took it underground,
didn't have the mojo for lasting
opposition to
yankee ordnance
but he covered the
desert like hoarfrost.
Tonight, I salute the old chief with my
Cormac McCarthy
existentialist long road
whisky neat &
James McMurtry is
singing Too Long In The Wasteland;
one November he fell off his
Spanish pony into the river & drowned,
with his last breath
moon rise is provoked over a
red Mexican dusk,
- his taut shadow burns the bloody
earth.
Deep Song
- -after Jack Hirschman
the sun is as far south as it's
going to shine, its apogee faces another
solstice blaze of snow, it glints
off their resurrected revolvers like an extra-
terrestrial wink-
the wind blows triggerfingers of desert
zen across the stone mind of
- la frontera
scattering the landscape with
broken sleep
- & dreams. . .
a talon moon claws the west
There's an ancient deep song
sung by poets, Andalusian
gypsies & matadors,
forever young,
drenched in sangre as
the desert wind blows roadside bombs
over the solstice heart of Aztlan-
& they explode in my dreams
like gaudy flowers.
On my front porch
the wind blows deep song through the bitter-
sweet jangle of the chimes,
the wind blows out the incandescent hiss
of my campfire,
deep song blows a bounty through
the truncated dreams of a Gila wolf,
deep song pulses through the family
blood of a future father's
trembling night-long wait in an
arroyo under the border wire.
Some days the gaudy flower of the sun
shines down on me like
A smiling stoned holy man wandering
Sonora In July;
Other days, when I think of war
the deep song of the sun rises slowly from its apogee
plaintive & raw-boned,
sluggish, radiance more
ritual than desire
drought-chafed expressionless
spews shadows without passion
roams la frontera during
these doldrums of January
Mother of dry rivers, Sam Peckinpah
& Garcia Lorca
harbinger of imminent
summers.
On a Clear Day You Can See the Grand Canyon
When the cold winds blow another April in
I wear a wreath of condors
each one mates for life
each one avoids holy communion with men
each one circumnavigates the tawny canyon like
ancient shadow
back from extinction
each one sketches a cartoon
dance architecture on
these chilly
diablo chinooks.
Hissing, whistling,
grunting,
gregarious, familial
high over the cruelest month,
they surround my mind
- in a magic ring
Hieronymus Bosch birds with faces
any mother could love.
I pray to them
hunters, gatherers
wing slingers high over the
Painted Desert
in the thick particulate skies
air mailed from Los Angeles
- & smokestack Mexico.
you can see the Grand Canyon.
Here, the river is my second language-
I repeat her name three times in silence.
She twists along the bottomland shaving
- eons of
gneiss & schist from the cliffs
with nothing but the
patient, unarticulated will to flow
past our
urbane extinction almost the the sea,
today, on Samuel Beckett's birthday,
as the sun sets behind me
on a bed of coals.
Asylum Frontier
This Ginnever sculpture
rises three balanced,
rusty squares
eighteen feet into blue sky,
like Cubist smoke
while down below
at the base, years ago
several Apache
waved a blanket over a
signal fire telling the others
the army of the west
was clanking, solemn
dusty, marching their way
with the taste of rusted blood
on their tongues.
So I no longer wonder
about that darkened movie
theatre that Sunday afternoon
when Willard
tells Kurtz he doesn't see any method at all.
Or whether or not God
shaves his head.
This is the asylum frontier
where the military &
Sonny Rollins say:
"cultivate controlled anarchy",
where November can still
seduce with surreal
maroon leaves & the serene warmth
of Garcia Street.
This sculpture is called "Ascension"
& the breeze echoes
like a Cajun fiddle above
the solemn commerce of a
bereft humanity.
Sonnet XXXIV
The spontaneous routine of the turkey vulture
glides on a spring eddy over the nuance-bejeweled
desert. We'll follow you out of this drought, I whisper to
myself, shading my eyes in a parking lot in this beautiful
wasteland town. Dark brown wingspan etched in the
distance like an infant's fingerprint against the mesa &
in a shadowless, swooping gesture as if grace is a metaphor
for sky, lands on a putrid sculpture of carrion. Each
talon practically glistens with deliberation. The focus is
trancelike, primitive & sizzles on every contrary current
with the informed pre-historic minutia of survival & flight.
In a shadowless, swooping gesture I declaim civilization,
shove Warren Zevon into the car stereo & turn up the volume
until all of Tularosa can hear the buzzard whisper: I will send for rain.
John Macker's most recent book is "Woman of the Disturbed Earth." Previously published is "Adventures In The Gun Trade" (Denver: Long Road/La Cantera Press, 2004) and he has completed a cd called black/wing with John Knoll. He Lives with wife, Annie, a few miles south of Las Vegas, NM with some cool views of the llano. Recent poetry published in magaziness & anthologies include Manzanita Quarterly, Sin Fronteras/Writers Without Borders, mad blood #'s 1 & 2, Pinyon Poetry (Mesa State College.), & Poets For Peace, cd, (Santa Fe.) Won 2006 mad blood magazine literary arts award for poem, "Wyoming Arcane." Also nominated for 2006 Pushcart Prize. (Oct '05, October 07. December 08)
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