This poem took me to new heights of frustration. It’s a narrative poem, which means that it’s necessary to convey everyday details in sequence. That’s how the poem began, and it lacked the images and lyrical potential of the impression I wished to create. So today I returned to the typewriter, hammering out the last draft on my Hermes 3K. If I could lay out the pages on a table, maybe I could find my way through this awkward mess. I jotted down more notes with a pen, after which I returned to the computer. As the poem took shape, I found myself reinforcing the lyrical in the first and third sections, bookending the middle narrative. It’s a triptych, I suppose. I asked Eliezane to read it to me, because I can’t recite my own poetry. As she read it, I became increasingly pleased with the end result. Will there be more changes? Possibly, but the sculpture has taken definitive form.

Call and Response, Gallup 2020

I

Gnarled hands
of a thornless locust
tremble leafless
into bluing, rooted

to a story
under a gravel park
buckling beneath the girth
of the BNSF.

Fifth-wheels shoulder
gelid wind, snow-
capped headstones
ready for engraving;

but all names erode
faster than the blink
of an eye, under
the gaze of Church Rock:

Route 66,
Fire Rock Casino,
Marathon Petroleum–
dinosaurs adrift.

II

Just back from Fort Defiance,
a first responder
eases an F-350
beside a Montana.

The day unmasked,
he idles in snowfall,
hands at ten and two,
white-knuckled,

his dry-creek eyes
so strange in the mirror
replaying the last words
of an elder:

We met in a Hooverville
during the Dust Bowl.
I wear his Purple Heart.
He sings in the wind.

In Diné she said goodbye
over Facetime
to a family of nine
quarantined on the rez.

She wheezed like the canyon,
her eyes a glimmering
Boulder turquoise
reaching through pixels

to a girl swaddling a doll
with hair like a river
woven from stories
looking for answers.

He idled in snowfall,
under the thornless locust,
until he found the medal
in his breast pocket.

III

Behind USA RV
flakes accumulate
like cold, white songs
over desert brush,

but the trail
connecting
to Western Skies
is still visible:

beyond the rise,
a small brown horse,
still as a daylit moon,
waits for spring

when the thornless locust
greens in Gallup,
reaching into the bluing,
renewing stories.

—–

And here is a piece I created for Eliezane’s art show: