Perhaps a childhood magic-writing tablet, which when you raise the sheet becomes blank again with a sound like pulled adhesive, after 200 years still largely a @3tabula rasa,@1 in winter it is a watercolor wash, a pale prehistory of color with only the most tender smudges of lavender and mauve where land rises enough for shadow. A state of space inhabited by wind, whose dusty phalanx harries broods of tumbleweed, it is only slightly scrawled with evidence - Shoshoni Crowheart Massacre Hill stray facts of pioneers and Teapot Dome less real than the pronghorn that race the highway carrying in their heads the dark eyes of dead Indians. The clean sweep of land we populate on a supermarket rack with male, paperback hips hunched by guns or on a movie screen's blank with saucers and aliens who come, out of a space beyond stars, to rescue us like a tribe of unknown ancestors, their eyes enlarged by makeup men to the shadow of an antelope stare. |