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...CLEAR AND COLDER; BOSTON COMMON by ROBERT FROST THE NEW APOCRYPHA: BERENICE by EDGAR LEE MASTERS THE NEGRO DANCERS by CLAUDE MCKAY THE BATTLE OF NASEBY by THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY THE LAST SUPPER by RAINER MARIA RILKE COUNCIL by ELIZABETH BROWN (AMERICAN) TWO BARDS by RICHARD EUGENE BURTON EPIGRAM: 31. LOVE'S CAPRICIOUSNESS by CALLIMACHUS TOWARDS DEMOCRACY: PART 2. THESE WAVES OF YOUR GREAT HEART by EDWARD CARPENTER |