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I wrote this
in Ohio in 1972, after having left Colorado earlier that year.
Perhaps I already knew I would be accepting a job in California
-- but hardly in the desert -- starting the next month.
I had one particular Colorado day-trip that I had taken in mind, and
incorporated some few
memories and impressions and imagination. It was a drive taken alone in my
Ford Pinto (the first car I ever owned), to the southeast part
of the state, in the previous year. The road image that leads to
this poem isn't from that trip, but it is from the same general
era, and it seems to fit pretty well. |
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DESERT SENTENCE |
We have flattened miles, the small green
Ford and I fending against the dry fall
Wind/ing into far parts of the desert
Approaching silent twilight's ashen glow
Down jigsaw hiways of the pale & gold desert;
An imperfect silence, the imperfect
Silence of warm fall wind quashed
By foot and foot impacting the incivil
Tree-dearth domain, pallid land-
Escape of autumn wind unsilenced
Sanding road and pole and wire--
Featureless Ford shedding its distinction
And self incursive on the lizard-crisscross
Desert, domain uncolored by leaf, by only
Great waves of sand spraying uncolored
Rearranging landscapes of their dis-
Feature (perfectly silent sun nuzzling the
Humps of ashen volcanic heaps, the keepers
Of a pale silent treeless past,
The conic, undistinguished past);
Step and step on the smithereen hiway
Kicking at lizards and coughing dry mud,
Tonguing the rich blood of sundown
To slake great desert thirst, whistling
Dry winds disturbed imperfect silence
Until I dumb and guilty doglike
Squirt on sand my urinedrops with booted
Drifts of desert coagulate wet effort,
Guiltily uncomfortable in guileless
Function--comfortless, like a man,
Like a man I remind in the pale
Domain myself kicking lizards and
Glowing sand, relieved these steps +
Steps from the technocentric exactions
Of the small green Ford waiting,
Extinct ashen shade unrolling evening,
Whorling the desert into mystic semi-
Civil figures newly rearranged
To accost me should I trek the dark
And pale gold glowing sands: knee-
Knocked cowpoke coming for Satur-daynight
Drunk and tangent one lost pioneer
Coughing one last bloody dream
Of lush California evanescent
Among the igneous humps as he scouts
His child a Christian grave------------me,
Counting off the rest of a sundown mile
Before extinguishing virile imagination
And flattened with repugnance for
The progression of a century I turn
To recover the Ford waiting squat and
Dumb like an old spoiled but patient dog
Ready to nuzzle one rubbery paw, dull
Eyes thirsting (where next?) now that
We have been to the palefire desert and
Have seen its flat and heaped configurations
Undoing themselves in ashen twilight------------
And me, countering unspeakable personification
With sand-scratched & repugnant tongue: "this
too; this will be yours; home now-- no escape." |
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Toledo, Ohio
August, 1972 |
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