Dust Town

I. 'The Grave'


Sat smoking on concrete walls of recent grave heavy with fruit
of its burden

No headstone or footnote yet someone
mailed a father’s day card
(in a steel lockbox key taped to the lid)

Left photographs of baby smiling on daddy’s knee

Piece of river down quartz smoothed wrinkled watercolor
child’s painting
unsure, unsteady hands placed for blind (and rotting) eyes

It startles me the kinship I share with the dead

speak no more and say so much

Dry body in a dust town

Little to mark the passing of day

Weeds grown golden, sighing oaks, rattle of squirrel
screams of angry blue jays hunting for scraps among
moldering marble plaques

These old California towns amaze me
how they eddy in currents of age while the mechanized
world presses in against them

Old road, old concrete, leaning barns yet no more than
a bare handful of miles away the zoom of a hundred automobiles
scrapping machined rubber against the government subsidized asphalt

somehow these old mining ruins remain untouched

not even to cough up their dead


II. 'Dry River, Dry Town'

heat presses shade
gives no relief
I can’t believe my life has
stretched
so far
so fast

my memories of California rise
in mind as nuggets of ore
washed to the banks
after the toil of the river

(dry river dry town dry
once my life)

I speak only of memory

now I
forget to forge new ones

this really is the backbone
of my development
these dusty stones
chirp-chirp of crickets
hiding in
manzanita

landscape of my dreams even now

thought I returned July to see
the things I knew as a child
but I can’t...

I can’t
whisper away the mind of myself
now grown children
of my own

dead oak lends little shade

can’t wide-eye imagination any longer

no illusions left to my old eyes
nothing left to see


III. 'Rosebud'


The rosebud grows in the fields of El Dorado
The rosebud grows in the fields of El Dorado

Strives up against dry weeds all the same color, gold
yet rosebud is a thing of green
life, eyes

Though it has been three years since I gave it dirt
or took its image into my sore solemn mind
it grows
it grows unbidden

Something for unwashed summer children
to pluck and carry home (weary)
for further investigation

I have looked into the rose
looked into folded soft silk leaves

seen it from all angles on countless starless nights

it is still a rose