To find a dog that’s gone missing, leave a piece of clothing behind, the scent of which the dog will follow. You can try calling, but the air is thin, and messages seldom carry.
When we leave town bound north there are 180 degrees of sagebrush
in front of us
& we follow the dirt road eighty miles farther
than anyone has bothered to name a town: fleas drowned
in the sweat of a horse’s back
We know we are invisible
in-betweens tucked in a wall of light-bulbs swallowed up
in the glow of the bigger & better
in the anonymity of a blank sky A whole valley without streetlights
the Nevada forgotten in the shadow of Vegas
We are dissolved
like lizards in the scaly brush
all life under the hot sun thriving on its invisibility wedged in with rocks
& sifted through in the dried-up creek beds running
would-be water over arrow-heads
that only appear after the spring runoff
between petrified wood cubes & quartz shavings
When the rain comes
we see it coming
thirty miles off: the clouds running on wet canvas slate diagonals
making it halfway to the ground
Geography named for presidents
who’ve forgotten it:
Ike’s Canyon Mt. Jefferson its peak
snow-covered & blooming black in a terrarium of gunmetal clouds
We hear the canyon walls with their streaks of ore
hurling dust devils down on the mining shacks
You sent men you sent them with shovels
our veins are still being let We wear our scarves like burial shrouds
to keep the dust out of our mouths & we are swaddled in woodsmoke
embalmed in bars
dark with oil paintings of nudes
& bloody-marys half tabasco
We throw back the bowl of this valley
in one swig burning holes in our throats so we can speak again
Our lips ruined mouths puckered like sour chords
our voices guitar strings that rattle too-loose against the hard
nothing.
But by now we are any other string & finally unwound:
a horsehair a rotted-out strip of bark
Incomplete sets of bones
made blinding in our chalky transcendence
beacons to the Milky Way that scream take me
Until the dry ground chokes its children back down
erecting desert flowers in their place:
bright specks of red on the cracked plain.
This poem was awarded a 2009-2010 AWP Intro Journals Award.
This poem first appeared in Puerto del Sol, Volume 45, Number 2 (Winter 2010).