In the Cabeza Prieta from a hillock I saw no human sign for a thousand square miles except for a stray intestinal vapor trail with which we mar the sky. I naturally said, "I'm alone." The immense ocotillo before me is a thousand-foot-high rope to heaven but then you can't climb its spiny branches. In Daniel's Wash I heard and saw the great mother of crotalids, a rattler, and at a distance her rattles sounded exactly like Carmen Miranda's castanets, but closer, a string of firecrackers. In 1957 in New York I was with Anne Frank who was trying to be a writer but they wouldn't buy her dark stories. We lived on Macdougal south of Houston and I worked as a sandhog digging tunnels until I was crushed to death. She cooked fairly well (flanken, chicken livers, herring salad). Now Ed Abbey rides down from the Growler Mountains on a huge mountain ram, bareback and speechless. This place is a fearsome goddess I've met seven times in a decade. She deranges my mind with the strangest of beauties, her Venusian flora mad to puncture the skin. It's ninety degrees and I wonder if I'm walking so far within her because I wish to die, so parched I blow dust from my throat. Finally I reach the hot water in my car and weep at the puny sight. Is this what I've offered this wild beauty? Literally a goddamned car, a glittering metallic tumor. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...DOMEDAY BOOK: MIRIAM FAY'S LETTER by EDGAR LEE MASTERS THE NEW APOCRYPHA: BERENICE by EDGAR LEE MASTERS THE GORSE by WILFRID WILSON GIBSON SPRING'S WELCOME, FR. ALEXANDER AND CAMPASPE by JOHN LYLY THE HIGHER GOOD by THEODORE PARKER |