What a way to spend the golden years, Tomasito! Jackassing around in all weather, pickheaded and spade handed, (Never closer to ten-strike than the Mother-in-Law Lode!) Through deserts temporal and spiritual where every badlands bonanza Turns into borrasca . . . and always trying to find the handle For the Malpais: the name for the As-Yet-Undiscovered Country, And find the Logos and Lost Dutchman of the One and Ore-bearing Word . . . Many cold camps on the trail of live language, little cheechaco, And my only companion a burro who brays like a bourgeois poet! A whole week wasted: packing through one black pass! And another morning gone crossing the rotten talus To con the quartz of a cliff-face, then over the ridge And into a new river-system -- the rock barren and rotten, Snow on the breakneck slope and ice right down to the water . . . And all in the vain search for a single word, and one That's probably full of fool's gold at that! Damn crazy way to spend so much of a life -- To hell with that word, Tomasito! Let's go out in the sun! Used with the permission of Copper Canyon Press, P.O. Box 271, Port Townsend, WA 98368-0271, www.cc.press.org | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...HIS CAVALIER by ROBERT HERRICK UPON THE SAYING THAT MY VERSES WERE MADE BY ANOTHER by ANNE KILLIGREW A POET'S FANCIES: 8. THE MODERN POET; A SONG OF DERIVATIONS by ALICE MEYNELL MONNA INNOMINATA, A SONNET OF SONNETS: 13 by CHRISTINA GEORGINA ROSSETTI SONNET: 33 by WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE FABLE: 16 by ANTOINE VINCENT ARNAULT |